realized today that blogspot blogs are their own domain and can use the "site:" parameter to do an internal search. a little html source code hacking later and voila, my own personal blog search.
if that means nothing to you, look in the right hand column and check out the little "Search ( ! )" box.
In May, Google acquired/hired dodgeball.com, a SMS-based social networking tool. Since NYC is precisely the kind of place where the ability to find out what bars/clubs friends are at and how to meet up with them is important, I've been using dodgeball for a while now since moving into the city. But, as you shall now hear, dodgeball is thankfully available in a number of major cities.
I'm in the bay area for a few days and I was supposed to meet up with my sister at a bar in San Francisco last night. Unfortunately, she gave me directions on how to get there while I was in a groggy-post-nap condition and, hearing her wrong, I some how convinced myself that the bar was on third street. It wasn't. My sister, being my sister, is absolutely terrible about answering her cell phone so there I am, groggy, in San Francisco (which I am not familiar with at all) with no idea of where I'm supposed to go.
Then, in a moment of brilliance, I opened up an SMS compose message to sf(a)dodgeball.com and queried it with the name of the bar, "21st amendment?" 10 seconds later I received back dodgeball's glorious response "Sounds like you're looking for the 21st Amendment @ 563 Second Street (btw. Bryant and Brannan)..." And all was good (so was their jerk chicken).
So you super observant readers might notice this, but the ( ! )'s main page has changed subtly. Now under each post, you can not only see how many people have commented, but who has commented.
It's a neat little feature I found out about here. There are lots of other "hacks" you can add to your blog that I might try playing with in the future too.
I bought a mattress from Sleepy's Mattress whatevers on the beginning of July. I thought all was good, they were willing to deliver it soon, were giving me a good price, and so on. When the sales rep went to go ring it up, she had trouble getting the discounts to work out properly, so she was $20 above the price we had agreed on. She fuddled around with the computer for 10-15 minutes until finally convincing me to pay the total bill and have her write a note on the receipt promising me a phone call and my $20 back.
A week later. My mattress had arrived fine, but no call from the sales woman. I went back to the store, but a different sales rep was there. He called the store the woman was working on to confirm the refund. She gets on the phone and tells me that she tried to call me the day of my purchase to tell me that her manager had not approved our "deal" but that there must have been something wrong with the number I gave her because she was not able to get through, which is crap, seeing as she gave my # to the delivery guys who had no trouble getting a hold of me. After bitching at her and talking to other sales rep, I was able to get the process of refunding restarted, with a promised call in a few days.
Two weeks later, no call, no refund. I go to the store once again and talk to yet another rep. who appears to be higher up in the chain. She tells me they've had problems what my original rep in the future and apologizes. She then does mumbojumbo with my card and says that they'll be refunding me $60, again sorry for the inconvenience. That was 3 weeks ago and I still haven't seen any money put back into my account.
So, what do we learn? Never buy from Sleepy's. Never ever ever. I hope someone who was thinking of buying from them reads this post and changes their mind. At the very least, I'll never buy from them again.
So my suitemates and I live in a new apartment in a complex which only opened recently. Amoung other things, this means the apartment gadgets are still new.... which is why we only recently realized we've been refrigerating our fridge's instruction manual for the last month.
