Geek Drivel

GoddessJ and I recently visited an Ikea store to get some furniture for our new house. As always, my attention was drawn to the fake computers and TVs they have in their display rooms.

You’ll be as sad as I to learn that one of the manufacturers of such props (I think it’s the one that the Ikea store we visited uses) suffered “a major catastrophe” recently. Fortunately, it sounds like they’re still in good financial shape, and will be making new fake electronics in short order.

(Via Boing Boing)

Very intriguing. Unfortunately it sounds too good to be true, so it probably isn’t.

If that translates to TV and radio too, it might explain why idiot talk-shows are so popular with advertisers (and broadcasters).

I’ve always been leery of anything that requires a subscription. As the article points out, some are inevitable — in our case, Internet access and (land-line) phone service, with fairly basic cable TV on top of that — but we steer clear of anything else that demands ongoing payments. Even so, just those three things costs us $150 a month.

It’ll be interesting to see how this fight turns out. And important as well. If North Dakota wins, it’ll put a damper on any attempts to use carbon tariffs.

(Yes, it does “unfairly” give renewable energy an advantage over coal powered energy — that’s the whole point to it. But if I read the law correctly, there’s nothing preventing that; Minnesota is perfectly within its rights. On the other hand, as everyone should know, strange things happen in courtrooms.)

This sounds like a really good idea. Anybody want to start a new business, fact-checking things for serious bloggers?

(FYI, I would not be a customer. I’m cheap, I’m not terribly serious, and I fancy that I can check my own facts, especially as this blog has so few of them. )

WARNING: If this doesn’t make you laugh out loud, no matter where you are or what time it is, then you’ve never tried to deal with a customer service line.

I wonder if one if the prime drivers for entrepreneurship is bad management. I have to think that bad management pushes a lot of capable people out of their day jobs, and those people go on to become entrepreneurs. [...]

Sorry, Scott. I’m an employee-turned-entrepreneur myself, and bad management had very little to do with the change. You come to expect stupid management decisions; it’s part of the background, you don’t even notice it after a few weeks on the job.

It’s not until you leave to run your own business that you start to see just how stupid some of those decisions were… and how unexpectedly intelligent some others (that seemed equally stupid from a worker’s perspective) were. You really do have to walk in a business owner’s shoes for a while to really understand the things driving him to make those decisions.

On the other hand, bad management (elsewhere) is definitely part of the reason I stay an entrepreneur.

The practice of putting a mandatory tip on the bill for a large party has been fairly standard for as long as I’ve been going to restaurants. But bumping this mandatory “gratuity” up to eighteen percent, as was done here and as I experienced myself a couple days ago, is ridiculous — I give servers a fifteen percent tip for good service (which, in my opinion, I should be able to expect from any business without the extra bribe), and the server in our case didn’t earn more than ten percent. And to add insult to injury, the credit card receipt included a line for an “additional tip.”

(I briefly considered putting a negative number there, but instead just put a very large zero. If I’d been on my game, I would have written “don’t eat lead” instead.)

Will wonders never cease?