Universal Remote for Karaoke Machine

Today a girl comes in and starts that super long explanation that culminates in, “I need a universal remote for this karaoke machine.”  My first thought is to tell her to just throw away the karaoke machine, it is just not a good idea.  Reality, there are many, many things listed on the universal remote package, but karaoke machine is not one of them.  She’s a ding-dong and doesn’t believe me.  So we go look.  Sure enough, no karaoke machine.  So we do the sensible thing and tell her that she should call the company and ask them to send her a replacement.  Well this will not work, because of course they waited till the last minute.  They need it tonight.  Sounds like your screwed.

Idea number two, call the company and see if the universal remotes will work with the karaoke machine.  They would be the people that would know.  Her idea was to show us a picture of the remote to see if we had one that looked like the one in the book.  Well, its a remote for a karaoke machine, so of course we don’t have one that looks like it.

Now that I have the unfortunate ability to correctly spell “karaoke”, I am going to stop my story.

Twitter

Everyone seems to be using Twitter these days.  Ok, maybe its mostly the tech inclined, but that is still a lot of people.  I have been resisting this form of communication for some time now.  I don’t know why.  But, I have now given in to the many temptations.  I should be able to keep everyone up to date on all the crazy shit people do in the store.

Since Leo Laporte was the main inspiration for getting on Twitter, I have added him to my following list as the first person.  I’m sure he could care less, seeing as he has over 50,000 followers.

You can follow me @ http://twitter.com/n3rvp4in

Reasons Why I Hate Vista

Since everyone else has a list of reasons why they hate Vista, I thought that I would put my two cents in also.  I mean, people who don’t even use Vista have a list of things they don’t like about it.  Why shouldn’t I also join this trend.

1.  Vista’s user interface looks like and improved XP interface.

How dare they!  It looks similar to XP, but we all know that underneath it is totally different.  Why on Earth would you want to improve on an interface that has gotten you so far.

2.  Where is everything?

When I first used Vista, I had some trouble finding things that I knew exactly where they were in XP.  Oh Shit,  you mean this isn’t XP.  But it looks so much like it.  Well, this would explain why things are not in the same place.  Kinda like when switching to XP from 98, I had to learn where everything was now that I had a brand new OS.

3.  The network wizard worked the first time.

Oops!  Something must be wrong.  The network wizard didn’t require manual configuration.  While I am a bit of a control freak when it comes to my system, I like that I should be getting fewer calls from people who can’t get the network to work.  Of course, this is assuming that they don’t automatically assume that it isn’t going to work from all the media hype.

Ok, that should be enough for now.  I feel complete since I have bitched about Vista a little.  You know, join the rest of the crowd.

Cuil Not So “Cool”

First of all, I want to state that I am glad the Google has a new competitor.  It gives the techies an option when trying to search the interwebs.  However, Cuil seems to be having problems.  I will chalk this up to them being brand new and with all the media hype, they probably got flooded with traffic.

Here is an example of the trouble I had when trying out Cuil.  I searched for a term on Google and received many, many pages.  I then searched for the term on Cuil.  First attempt, no results.  I try again and again and again.  On the fourth, attempt, Success.  2305 results.  No where near as many as Google, which is not necessarily a bad thing as Google does spit back too many results on most occasions.  Now that I think it is working, I go back and search for the same term again.  What do you know, “No Results”.

This seems to be an incident of too much traffic, but I don’t know for sure.  What I do know is that if the search engine spits back “No Results”, people will not use it for long.  Here’s to hoping that this situation improves soon.

Montana Has NO Sales Tax

Ok, for everyone who is not from the state of Montana, I would like to inform you that the state of Montana has NO sales tax.  This may be obvious from the title of this post.  So if you would like to jump on a plane or spend the money on the gas to drive out there and shop sales tax free, be my guest.  I do believe that you do need to report this to the state that you live in when you get back, but who does that these days.

Now to the people of Montana.  YES, you do have to pay sales tax in most states.  Just because you are from a state that doesn’t charge a sales tax, doesn’t mean that you are automatically exempt in other states.  I suggest that you write a letter complaining to the state in question and see if they will return the tax amount to you.

Take It Out of the Box

I think that I bitched about this before, but there has been another incident.  Why do people need everything taken out of the box?  Oh, they will give you many reasons, but I think they are mostly bullshit.  For instance, they want it taken out of the box so they can look at the item.  Well in our store, 98% of the items that you would want to look at are already out of the box.  When you need to have a window AC unit taken out of the box to “look at it”, what exactly are you “looking” for?  There is a picture on the box and when you remove it from the box, it looks just like the picture.  For that matter, it looks pretty much like all of the window AC units.

I think that these people do this just to see people do things for them.  They don’t have enough people doing things specifically for them, so they like to frequent retail establishments and have the employees there do whatever.  Usually they have a multitude of requests and ask questions that make little to no sense in reference to the product in question.

Just a Random Photo

I took this photo at the gas station.  The image quality isn’t great as it was taken with the camera on a phone.  Enjoy!

“Excepted!!”

Redneck wants Wi-Fi Booster

The morning, first customer of the day, a full blown redneck comes in the store.  He says that he is staying at a local campground and is having trouble connecting to the free wi-fi.  Well, I did a bid for the guy that owns the campground to upgrade the wireless network.  He plugged in a cheap consumer grade wireless router and called it “free wi-fi”.  Only problem is that it only covers an area with a 25 ft radius around the campground office.  Considering that the campground is over a 1/4 mile square, this is hardly usable by most campers.  He didn’t want to spend the money to put in a proper system, but I suppose that he does have wi-fi and its free.

I ask the redneck if he has a laptop of desktop in his camper.  Simple question.  His response, “What does it matter”?  Ahh, a hostile redneck.  So I spend the next 10 minutes explaining the differences in the equipment used for desktops and laptops.  This is clearly not going well, he keeps asking the same questions over and over.  So, he has a laptop.  I explain that the equipment that we have will not help him.  The laptop cards don’t have “more power” and they don’t have antenna ports.  He wants to know why he can’t just buy a wireless extender.  Well let’s see.  You don’t know the network configuration and you can’t just run around adding things to another person’s network.

Now he can’t believe that with today’s technology, he can’t just show up at a store and buy something that will just automatically boost the wi-fi signal.  Holy shit, we got ourselves a smart one.  He knows the word “technology”.  So I finally tell him that I would be glad to order him something that might help his situation, but I can’t  make any guarantees about the effectiveness in solving him problems.  So Bubba says, “You guarantee that it will work”.  WTF?  I just said I don’t know that it will solve the problem, to many “f-a-c-t-o-r-s”.  I will have to reevaluate his “learnin’”.    Oh well, I will just have to order a bad-ass USB based wi-fi card and antenna and if he returns them, I will buy them for myself.

Realtree Camo

I mean no offense to people who use Realtree Camo for hunting.  I know several of you and some are reasonable intelligent.  That being said, we (the store employees and I) have come to the conclusion that people who wear Realtree camo for everyday clothing are not the, lets say, quickest people in the world.  We have decided this after several incidents with individuals wearing this type of clothing.  Maybe it is just a horrible coincidence.

Apple Computer Files Suit Against Psystar

I caught this post to Slashdot this afternoon and I must say that I am surprised.  Not because of Apple filing suit against Psystar, but that it took this long for them to file the suit.  I would have thought that Apple would have been on them like stink on shit within a day or two of them selling their first machine.  Really, what did the Psystar people think was going to happen?  That they would just happily sell computers with OS X installed on them forever and ever.  I don’t think so.

For what its worth, I would like to see Apple loose this legal battle.  Psystar will probably run out of money unless someone with long purse strings takes up their cause.  The FSF maybe.