So I was excited to find cardpool yesterday when I was purchasing some shoes (e:paul,57112) from dsw.com

I purchased 2 $25 gift cards for $44 which I thought was a good deal. I purchased them around 5PM yesterday. The system said the cards were electronic and would be delivered in 24 hours.

Toward the end of the business day today I got a call from California to confirm my purchase info but wasn't near my phone. Strangely, the number they call from can't accept calls so I had to listen to the whole message to get the number to call from. When I called that one, the system said they had not enabled their voicemail.

Finally around 5 they call me back and say in 3-4 hours the gift card should be ready. I got two of them. One works, and the other one doesn't. It was so frustrating because I bought them under the assumption this would actually work out within 24 hours. I actually thought a full 24 hours was on the ridiculous end of the scale. By the time I received the gift cards and found out the one was bunk they were closed for the day.

At this point I just had to buy the shoes because they was a limited number remaining and I was afraid they would sell out.

In the end it turned out to be a pretty poor experience. I don't think I would ever use their service again. I guess it really depends how this gets resolved but mostly having such a large delay between purchasing an electronic item with electronic delivery and its actual fully functional arrival is not really an awesome experience. I wonder if they will refund me or fix the card.

The strangest situation last night. I was trying to book a hotel in downtown portland for tonight. I looked at the downtown map area. Then I accidentally clicked on another map call "downtown portand - south waterfront". Then I prompted me to login, session timeout when I forgot the pass, etc so I used the back button to go back to the downtown map when I checked out but ended up with a South Waterfront area hotel which is out of the city. It would be like staying in Lackawanna in you were going to Buffalo.

I immediately called expedia to resolve the issue. I was cut off twice during transfer. Then they realized the corp office was closed until "5am eastern time" so I waited up and called again. Another cut off during transfer. I called back and got to a supervisor. The supervisor told me she couldn't do anything without corporate and they open 5am central time. I explain it is already 5am central time and we have an argument about time zones. She is in the phillipines and clearly does no understand american time zones. Then she says to call back in the morning.

So I call back this morning 7am pacific time and Lakisha at corporate in Vegas reviews my session and insists it was south waterfront. I explained that I think the issue was caused by using the back button. We argue about it and she says there is nothing she can do, I am stuck with it because otherwise expedia would have to eat the full cost. Clearly, expedia would not have to eat the whole cost because they must be making some profit and I was willing to pay more to be in the area I wanted and believed I was selecting.

I then explained to her that if she did not resolve this I was never using their service again, so the $200 lost would be much less than the entire of my future business by a large magnitude.

She said there was nothing she could do. It seems so stupid to me that they would have such bad customer relationship management. I didn't even want to cancel, I just wanted a room within the area, I was under the impression I was choosing and I was willing to pay more.

Maybe they should redesign their software so that the map is explicitly shown on checkout instead of just the name. The terms "Downtown Portand" vs "Downtown Portland - South Waterfront" look too similar when you were looking at both and though you had backed up to the first one, especially with all of the forgotten password, session timeout bullshit.

I am also going to make it a point to tell everyone I know about this terrible customer service experience from being hung up on several times to the way I was treated by Lakisha. I guess I will checkout priceline in the future. Looking at it now there site seems a lot nicer. Expedias seems real 2003.

I knew (e:lukamagnotta) was up to no good. But wow. I am almost scared to write about it.

Porn star hunted over body parts(UKPA) – 36 minutes ago  A porn actor is being hunted over the gruesome case of a dismembered body whose parts were mailed to different places including the headquarters of the Conservative Party of Canada.Luka Rocco Magnotta, 29, is wanted for homicide, Montreal police said at a news conference. According to an official close to the investigation Magnotta worked as a porn actor and there is video of the crime.Magnotta, believed to originally be from Toronto, was renting an apartment in a working-class Montreal neighbourhood, behind which police found a man's torso in a suitcase on Tuesday.The same day, a foot was found in a package mailed to the Conservative Party headquarters in Ottawa, and a hand was found at postal warehouse in the Canadian capital. Early testing shows the three body parts come from the same man, police said. The packages with the foot and the hand had been mailed to Ottawa from Montreal.Montreal Police Commander Ian Lafreniere said detectives are investigating the possibility that other body parts might have been mailed. He said the suspect and the victim knew each other, and it was not linked to organised crime."We're talking about a very disturbed person. It's very graphic. We're still missing parts of the body," Mr Lafreniere said.Police said Magnotta is also known by the names Eric Clinton Newman and Vladimir Romanov. They described him as white, 5ft 8in with blue eyes and black hair.Police discovered the severed foot after Jenni Bryne, a political adviser to prime minister Stephen Harper, opened a bloodstained box at Conservative headquarters on Tuesday. When she opened the box, a foul smell overcame the office.Conservative Party spokesman Fred DeLorey said: "It was such a horrible odour. I'm sure many of us will not forget it." Police said the package was addressed to the Conservative Party of Canada and not to a specific person.Officers confirmed on Wednesday that they intercepted a second package containing a human hand at an Ottawa postal facility late Tuesday. Police would not say where the package was addressed. Ottawa police said they were consulting with counterparts in Montreal after a janitor there discovered a severed male torso in a suitcase in a heap of rubbish behind the apartment building.

I just deleted 22,000 emails from my gmail and spent almost 4 hours unsubscribing from everything I ever signed up for in the last 5 years. Its amazing how complicated it is to unsubscribe from so much stuff. I can finally set my phone to auto sync because I think the inbox is now under control. Before this it would beep way too often with new crap, that I had set it to manual sync.

This is insane, I would rather be dead.

I was reading this article called "Pot smoking may more than double crash risk" on USA Today's website this morning

It seems obvious that driving while high is dangerous. Anyhow, the part that struck me was this:

A large U.S. survey in 2009 estimated that more than 10 million people aged 12 and over had driven while under the influence of illicit drugs in the previous year.

Why are 12 year old driving, much less driving on drugs!?!

Studies like this are so stupid. I can't believe people waste money on this, if there was any government funding it is even more outrageous but my guess is the funding was done by insurance companies.

I love the really awesome discoveries.

And the response was dose-specific, the authors said. That is, the more marijuana smoked -- in terms of frequency and potency -- the greater the likelihood of a crash.

Wow, what a freakin surprise. You mean the more drugs you consume, the more they affect you? That seems so surprising. I wonder how much these people were paid for this stupid study.

(e:tinypliny) sent me a link to some blogger page about something and it gave me this when I tried to visit using the android browser on my gingerbread phone.

I thought sidewiki was awesome. I Also know a lot of people that use Google desktop. Not that I ever trusted it.

So, in relation to my last entry. Petra Ecclestone also recently picked up the Candy Spelling Mansion for $85 million. It was one of the most expensive real estate transactions in the US but it was almost half off as it originally had a $150,000,000 asking price. She is clearly a bargain shopper as I already pointed out.

According to the LA times, Petra wasn't into all the antiques in the 120+ room mansion, so some antique dealers came in to bid on the stuff. Discussing a chandlier one dealer said:

"It's a $10,000 investment just in order to get it ready for sale," Boltiansky said. Anticipating a price in "the low six-figure range," the antiques dealer will not discuss exact figures until after the sales and then only with buyer permission.

Boltiansky is the president of Jan & Company in LA. And the LA times article links to their website: On the site it says, "Our 24,000 square foot showrooms in Los Angeles, California is filled with furnishings acquired from some of Europe's most prestigious residences."

But does this seem like the website for a place selling six figure chandeliers? Maybe they are just 100% committed to antiques of all genres, after all I would argue that the site qualifies for status as an antique web site.

Its so old it still has the inline dreamweaver javascript detecting netscape navigator 4 which was released in June 1997

function MM_reloadPage(init) {  //reloads the window if Nav4 resized
  if (init==true) with (navigator) {if ((appName=="Netscape")&&(parseInt(appVersion)==4)) {
    document.MM_pgW=innerWidth; document.MM_pgH=innerHeight; onresize=MM_reloadPage; }}
  else if (innerWidth!=document.MM_pgW || innerHeight!=document.MM_pgH) location.reload();
}
MM_reloadPage(true);

Poking around on the site I found this page which had the dates for the aquisition html templates:

Which brought me to the spelling mansion one.


Wow, that is one seriously impressive residence. Imagine greeting people at the front door.

Back to the site. Clearly managing the site involves a lo of copying and pasting template html pages and FTPing them back to the server. It seems like they could really benefit from something a little more automated. Something more 2011. Something with 3d views of the antiques. Maybe its time to re-invest some of that money in an upgrade of the web presence.

Clearly, those people are experts in antiques but web design - not so much. Maybe its a case of reaching out to student grandkid who didn't follow through with that career path.

On the upside they do have a very interesting glossary you budding antique enthusiasts