Thank you for your recent order from Despair, Inc.

I’d like to personally welcome you to our growing body of Dissatisfied Customers(tm), but to do so might evidence some actual concern for service and protocol. This might then lead to customer satisfaction, which would defeat the purpose altogether. That is why you have received this generic, form-generated email, written by some nameless lackey in our marketing department.

Having established that any pretense of consideration for your needs would be counter-productive to our raison d’etre at Despair Inc, let us now ponder a subject of greater interest to those among us who are worthy of both of our collective attentions - that person being me.

While you sit there wincing in disbelief at these bon mots of authentic insincerity and vexed by the intrinsic contradictions, I find I am beside myself with awe at Despair’s latest venture in Social Media, the Despair.com Facebook page. http://www.facebook.com/pages/Despaircom/6481756842

Hardly a man given to superlatives, I must nevertheless assert with David-Lee-Rothian boldness that Despair’s embrace of Facebook is laying the foundation for one of the most revolutionary experiments in online media that you will ever witness. By joining Despair.com’s Facebook page, you’ll get closer access than you’ve ever had to the heart of the entire Despair, Inc. operation. Behind the scenes on photoshoots. Getting inside scoops and access to exclusive coupon codes not being made available to public at large. First look at new videos Despair’s created?

I can already hear the chorus of delighted and disbelieving shouts? “Does this REALLY mean Despair’s going to be releasing more videos? Finally? After all this time?” Oh yes. A LOT more. So stay-tuned. And while you’re at our Facebook page, go ahead and LIKE us! (It’s really the least you could do after we’ve already stolen your money.)

At long last, after this lengthy exploitation of your attention for purely selfish marketing purposes, let us move on to yet another advertisement for our company. In anticipation of your next question- “How can I subject myself to even further marketing attempts by Despair?” Well, you’re in luck! Because Despair offers several additional opportunities to be on the receiving end on a steady stream of angst wrapped inside advertisements and covered in coupons. Those willing to endure the agony of it all will find themselves rewarded often with savings and freebies beyond belief. The Wailing List - (The Official E-Mail Newsletter of Despair) http://www.despair.com/subscribe1.html

The Wailing List Twitter Feed (An Unofficial Experiment by a Marketing Peon in the Limits of Your Endurance- with an occasional coupon code thrown in…) http://twitter.com/wailinglist

Alas- if you find that even daily contact from the forces of Despair Marketing personnel is simply not enough to satisfy your needs, well… Seriously? You might need a hobby… The only people subjected to more frequent abuse at our hands are our employees- and take it from us, there is such a thing as too much of a bad thing… If any of the information shown below is inaccurate, please notify us immediately using our Troubled Ticketing system. http://www.despair.com/trti.html

We will rectify your error immediately, and on some occasions, without snickering. It is the least we can do, which, as a matter of policy, is the most we can do.

Sincerely not really writing you this email, E.L.

Now onto the “please take my money” part.
I wanted to buy myself 2 tshirts with my favourite Dilbert comics: 2007-12-17 and 2007-12-18
I placed an order on the http://thedilbertstore.com and was expecting to get the items in a reasonable time.

Got a confirmation that I placed the oder:

Thank you for ordering from Dilbert Store. Your order dated January 5, 2012 has been received. For customer service please refer to order#

Now it starts to get funny.
On Jan 14 got the following:

Thank you for your recent order! Unfortunately, due to inventory receipt issues we are unable to ship the following item to you until the date listed below.
If we do not hear from you, we will assume this delay is acceptable and will ship your merchandise as soon as it is available. Again, we thank you for your patience.
Item#: DB001490 - DILBERT STRIP T SHIRT BLK LG 000049256
Order Date: 1/05/12
Qty Ordered: 1
Price each: $19.99
Expected to ship on: 1/19/12

Getting over the fact that I received 2 emails (1 for each tshirt I guess) I figured that it’s not the end of the world. I’ll just get them later.

Wait. There’s more:
On Jan 24, 5 days after the items were supposed to be shipped I got:

PLEASE CONTACT US IMMEDIATELY TO AVOID ORDER CANCELLATION!
Thank you for your recent order! We appreciate your patience while we prepare your items with the highest standards of quality and service you’ve come to expect!
Unfortunately, due to inventory receipt issues we are unable to ship the following item to you until the date listed below.>
Should unforeseen further delays cause the expected ship date to be later than the date listed below, we are required to cancel your order for the item unless you tell us to keep this item on order to ship when it is available. The cancellation date shown below is the date before which you must contact us to indicate this preference. You may, of course, cancel this item from your order at any time. Any payments made will be promptly refunded to you. Keep in mind that for orders paid by credit card, your card is not charged until your item is shipped.

Again, to avoid cancellation of the items below, please call us toll-free at your earliest opportunity at 1-800-414-6584 or reply to this email.

Our thanks for your patience.

Your friends at THE DILBERT STORE

Item#: DB001490 - DILBERT STRIP T SHIRT BLK LG
Order Date: 1/05/12
Qty Ordered: 1
Price each: $19.99
* Contact us before 2/02/12 to avoid cancellation of this item from your order.

Again, 2 emails - 1 for each tshirt.

So now we went from we’ll ship them later to we won’t ship them unless you really really want them, and even then you might not get them.
WTF? Is it that hard to just tell me that you don’t have them in stock and let me just move on. Just put a freaking banner on your online “shop” saying “We don’t need your money”. That’s fine. But this? What’s this? I thought this is America, where everybody that sell you something wants to get it to you as fast as possible and make you come back for more.

The interaction with the cop was extremely short and to the point. I started switching lanes as soon as I saw the police cruiser pulling over into traffic from the median of the freeway. When I was officially being stopped I was already in the right lane waiting for the cop-mobile to turn its lights on.

The nice cop (he was actually a she) informed me that I was speeding, asked for my drivers’ licence and car registration, walked back to the car, prepared the ticket and handed it over to us. Everything took around 5 minutes. We were informed that we’re supposed to pay 93$ for doing 5 mph over the speed limit.

Took the ticket and didn’t think about it for a couple of days. On it you are given 3 options: pay the fine, admit guilt but request a hearing to explain the circumstances (mitigation) of simply don’t admit guilt and go to court (contest).

Before going further, you should known that in the evergreen state of Washington, in King County, you can request what’s called a ticket deferral, meaning that the current ticket won’t go on record if you don’t get another ticket for 12 months. You can only get a deferral once every 7 years and it’s at the discretion of the judge (ie you might ask for it and not get it). The administrative fee associated with a deferral is 150$. The reason I would want to pay 150$ instead of 93$ is because of the car insurance. Once the insurance sees the ticket they will ask you for more money…

Now, a sane person would expect a deferral check box on the ticket and everything would be over on the spot. Not the case.

So what I actually ended up doing is checking the 3rd option (contesting the ticket). I got a court date that was roughly 3 months after I’ve filled in and mailed the ticket (even if you have to pay the ticket you get to keep the money for that period of time)

Another interesting thing about King Country is that you have the option to defend yourself over mail, if you accept that the judge’s ruling will be final. So I went with that and wrote a lovely letter in which I explained that I don’t believe that 65 in a 60 zone is such a big deal (not the actual words but that was the message) and that I would like to request a deferred finding. The judge granted this, I payed the 150$ and moved on (with a speed lower or equal to the posted speed limit).

So the 3 steps to get a deferral in King Country:

1. Contest the speeding ticket and get a court date
2. Fill in and mail the form that arrived with the court date asking for a deferral
3. Pay the 150$ admin fee if the deferral was granted

For questions and status you can always call the court clerk.

Before coming to the US, my favourite beer was Silva Dark (Silva Bruna) - a Romanian beer. I would say that it was my favourite because of the strong caramel flavour.

After arriving in the US I’ve searched for a beer similar to this. I was under the impression that it would fit into the Porter or Stout category. Make no mistake, beer classification is serious shit in the US and no matter how much you know about different styles of beers you never know enough. Look at the wikipedia entry for beer styles to get a basic idea.

Anyway, from all the beers that I’ve sampled (which are not necessarily American beers) in the US here are my favourite ones:

1. Alaskan Smoked Porter - by far the best beer. Perfect flavour. Expensive.
2. Guinness Black Lager - closest in constency and flavour to Silva
3. Old Rasputin Imperial Stout - this one is an Imperial Stout: strongest beer sampled by alcohol content
4. Boddingtons Pub Ale - I like how creamy this beer is (the can version)

• Reflections on the year that just passed: see 2010+1
• New Year’s Resolutions: in my case no new resolution. I’ll just keep the one that I have (ie 1600x900)

Billy Currington - People Are Crazy

Brad Paisley - Remind Me (Duet With Carrie Underwood)

Rodney Atkins - Take A Back Road

Darius Rucker - Come Back Song

We found Canada, at least the British Columbia part we saw, to be different from the US. The speed limits were posted in km/h, the lanes were narrower. The artificialness we grew accustomed to in the US was gone. Vancouver itself is way more European than any other city we saw in the US. It reminded us of Bucharest - in a good way.

The “experience” at the US Embassy was priceless. The only thing that went well was the fact that we got the visa renewed. The whole experience feels very un-American, from being made up sit in line in the rain, having people bark orders at you and having to wait in at least 4 queues. It reminded us of how things work in Romania.

Overall we really really liked it in Vancouver and we will probably be going back to thoroughly explore the area.

I can already taste it…

Look, either you give me food or I’m gonna eat you…

After food effect

We did this hike hoping to see some autumn colors. Instead the winter had already taken over.

First three pictures are of Diablo Lake, part of the North Cascades National Park:

Pictures of the actual hike, with the frozen lake covered in snow in the last two pictures:

It didn’t take them long to figure out that, if you have multiple pages, there were certain parts that they would share.

Changing these parts for all the pages was painfull. At first they figured out a way to generate the pages by keeping the common parts in just one place and insert only the parts that were changing for all the pages. Dynamic pages were being born. Many ways of dynamically generating a page were invented.

Nowadays, for a relatively small blog, Wordpress (or a similar publishing platform) is the way to go. While it has its advantages, it also has some major drawbacks:

• you need a database to power the blog
• the pages are generated on the fly (Wordpress in written in PHP) so there is the additional time overhead of that
• you need to install security updates almost imediatelly as they appear
• you need to be carefull when backing up

Advantage: the convenience of using it is a big plus, and the reason Wordpress is so popular.

Now, if Wordpress is too mainstream for you and makes you look uncool it’s time to go back to the root (of the internet) an make your blog consist of only static html pages. At this point you will probably ask yourself: are you insane? Well, not really.

An interesting solution for generating static pages is Jekyll It’s what powers GitHub Pages, GitHub being that wonderful place on the internetz with the largest programming hipsterz per square-feet number :)

Now, if you don’t feel like writing your own logic and css styles for using Jekyll, somebody already did a pretty decent job. I give you you: Octopress

Once you:

• figure out how to export your current Wordpress blog into a format the Octopress/Jekyll can understand
• fix the crap that the exporter managed to export
• add support for tags
• add support for youtube brackets (basically what the wordpress plugin did)
• figure out how to enable comments via Disqus
• customize the theme so that your blog doesn’t look like 95% of all the blogs that use Octopress
• run the generator & copy the static pages over to the server

You are done.

The result: decent and extremly fast (static pages ftw). All the disadvantages of Wordpress are gone. The process of writing and publishing new content is a bit more complicated but that doesn’t really bother me. You can als get a bit more crazy with the transformations you do to your blog’s content by writing a couple of scripts