TehNrd

Tonight the wife and I did the after Christmas return run. If you did your return shopping last week you are nuts, unless for some completely logistical reason, you were forced to do it then. We were at the biggest and busiest mall in the state of Washington and it was not busy at all, yet most of the after Christmas sales were still going and merchandise stock was still decent.

One of our first stops was Victoria’s Secret for an exchange. If you have been shopping lately you know that there are two types of Victoria’s Secret stores. One, the not so man friendly, and two, the not man friendly at all. The latter are the older ones that still have the pink and gold decor splattered over every surface. The other is the newer remodeled stores which are more modern and use a white, black, and grey color scheme in the store. This particular store was the not so man friendly version.

Fortunately I was with my wife so I could play the part of being dragged into this store against my will, which is actually the preferred image I want to pass off to the other patrons. The other, and much worse image, is you alone. This is not good, as every other female in the store looks at you as if you are a pervert or some dumb husband/boyfriend trying to buy some super sexy outfit that your wife/girlfriend doesn’t even want. Even if in actuality you are simply purchasing a specific item on their Christmas list!

But I digress. Tonight we are looking to do a straight up exchange but the item was not in stock. We then proceeded to the teller to process the return. The teller, who was a lady in her late 30s, asked what was wrong with the item. We responded. She then asked if we looked for the item we wanted and we said yes. At this point she said, “Let me have the people in the back check the stock room”, and at this point used her super spy secret service microphone to ask for help in the back…….no response……..30 seconds…….no response. “I’ll just go check myself”, she says and walks off.

When we first approached the counter I notice something a little strange. All of the tellers had the keyboards for the point of sales system up on the counter facing the customer. I assumed this was for the swath of returns they needed to process which requires the address of the customer returning the item. I figured letting the customer input it themselves would be quicker.

As the lady walked off I turned to my wife and said, “Heh, suckers. I’m gonna hack there system”. “Don’t”, she said but my mind was already committed. What to do? It was just me and the keyboard, the room seemed to fade away, the ridiculous fruity smells vanish, there was silence…………….BAM!!!!!! CTRL-ALT-DELETE!!!!!!! WHAT NOW SUCKAS!!!!!!! “Dang it Jason”, I heard the wife say, but it was too late, it had been done.

I turned to her and said, “Don’t worry, they probably aren’t even running a system that responds to CTRL-ALT-DELETE. It is probably some Linux based program”. Or is it…….I slowly began to look over the top of the screen and low and behold the Windows login screen was there, not the Task Manager and not the normal point of sales system. I hacked it! Whuahahahaha! Ya, I know what your’re thinking, but whatever, let’s just say I did anyway.

As the lady returned she saw the screen and was sincerely surprised. It was clear the store doesn’t have the employees login with through windows as she had no idea what to do. At this point my wife was saying, “I told him not to do it, he is like a child, he has to touch everything”. The teller responded with, “Mine is too”, but she clearly didn’t know what to do and at this point I leaned over the counter, looked at her screen and then said with suave, “I’ll fix it”. Then with my ninja like computer skills, looking at the screen upside down, used the integrated track ball on the keyboard to move the mouse and hit the Cancel button. At this point my wife was super embarrassed and was blushing big time but everyone was laughing, no harm done. The teller then looked at me and asked, “You are one of the computer guys. Aren’t you?”. “Ya, something like that I responded”, and we then headed out of the store.

Watch out, I’m about to get all philosophical. New Years is pretty dumb. Yup, it’s dumb. There are many reasons but here are a few.

Time doesn’t really exist. Okay, maybe it does, but it is very complicated and thousands of bright minds haven’t really been able to define time in a way that is acceptable across all studies. But we travel around the sun every 365 days (approximately), hello Jason, that is a year, duh. Actually, that is a measure of rotations and distance that when completed gets a label slapped on it called a year. Oh ya, well there are 24 hours in a day, what about that? 24 is completely arbitrary. It could very well be 50, 20, or 100. They same logic follows for minutes and seconds.

And what is up with January 1st? It’s completely random and most likely had to do with some religious event back in the day when the church controlled the calendar. The new year could very well start on October 1st. January 1st isn’t even on a solstice or equinox! If it was, the date might make a little more sense. My years started on February 7th (birthday) an actual event….but then again what does February 7th even represent?

New years resolutions are also stupid. If you really want to do something do it today, don’t wait. Really, whats the point of waiting? “I’ll wait until the new year to do something”, blah blah blah, an excuse to be lazy.

So do I hate everything about new years? No, there are some good things. EXPLOSIONS!!!!!!!! Who doesn’t like fireworks?

So what will I be doing tonight when the clock hits 12:00AM…………… the same thing I do every year, hanging out with friends and watching a ball drop or something, just like everyone else.

p.s. Don’t take this post too seriously, I know my logic has many holes.

I am now on Twitter. Hello my little bird friend.

I put it off for a long time mainly because I don’t care what people are eating for lunch or what movie they just saw. At least this is what I figured most of Twitter was about (and a lot of it still is) but this view changed rather quickly just a few days ago.

My little blog here in the corner of the internet gets traffic mainly from the developer.force.com discussion boards, from links posted on other Force.com related blogs, and the occasional search engine hit (Visualforce Popup is a hot one from search engines). It’s not a lot of traffic, but it is steady. After my Dreamforce 2009 Predictions post I saw a significant spike it traffic coming from Twitter. That blog post was tweeted by two different people and I saw site traffic increase three fold. It was easy to see the benefits of Twitter. Digging into some of the tweets I discovered what is a nice little ecosystem of Force.com/Salesforce.com users that actually post, errr…tweet, about relevant topics.

I have actually had a Twitter account for about a year now but I was one in the masses that had no tweets and no followers. Okay, so I had one tweet, which ironically was about me eating some pie. I remember the post (fric!, tweet) exactly and I was trying to explain to my parents, aunts, and uncles what Twitter was. I went on to explain it’s some lame micro blogging site where people post about everything they do. So of course I made a useless post about what I was eating. Oh how naive.

My main use of  Twitter will be to take advantage of this Force.com community, follow some trends, and post (oh my goodness… tweet) about force.com topics. Heck, maybe I’ll even toss in what I’m eating once in awhile……just kidding.

Now I ask for your help. Who are some great people in the twitter community to follow? What are some good tags to follow? I’ve already got #dreamforce, #force.com, and #salesforce. Please help this Twitter noob.

Click here for my Twitter page.

Dear Car Dealers,

Get with the times. My wife and I have spent the last four weeks test driving 12 different cars. Some cars were good and others not so good. Yet the most annoying, not surprisingly, aspects of buying a car is dancing (not literally, that would be weird) with the dealers. Most dealers are still using the same old tactics they have since the begining of car sales. This is dumb. People aren’t stupid anymore when they walk on to a dealers lot. In fact, I can learn more about the car online than most of the salesman know. So dealers, let’s be real, here are a few tips.

Second sticker
Really? You are going to artificially inflate the price of a vehicle based on “adjusted market value”. And you are going to do this in a serious recession? What are you smoking? This is such a turn off and as soon as I see this sticker the chances of me buying a car from you go way down. What the heck is “adjusted market value” anyway? Last time I checked every single one of those cars cost about the same to make no matter where it is being sold. The only real variable here would be the shipping costs which strangely enough are the same in Miami as they are in Seattle. So just because I may live in an area with a higher average income that doesn’t mean you can raise the price. Oh and don’t forget about this thing called the internet where I can go buy a car from some place that has a “lower” adjusted market value with a few clicks while sitting in my pajamas.

Test Drives
Don’t come with me, you are most likely annoying. I do understand that you may need to ride along if I am driving a really expensive car, but please, don’t talk. Having you in the car makes everything so awkward. I just want to relax and get a feel for the car but I can feel you breathing down my back from the rear seat. Any questions I have I can ask when I return, but you know what, I probably already have the answer because of this little invention called the internet. If I crash the car we all have insurance so don’t worry about that. If you don’t come with me you will also get to stay at the dealer and potentially help multiple customers at once and improve your sales. You can’t do this sitting in the back seat.

Dickering
Don’t. Once again with this magical tool called the internet I have a pretty good idea what you paid for the car. Based on my recent experiences I can usually get within $200 of what you paid. Now that I know your purchase price you have very little negotiating power. Let’s not waist time, just give me your more lowest price. If it isn’t low enough I won’t buy it. If I think you are messing with me there are about 5 other dealers that sell the exact same car as you, and I have no loyalty to you, I will walk out the door to the next dealer. If it’s fair price I’ll buy it.

So in the end guess what? We ended up buying a car from a dealer that list the lowest price they are willing to sell it for, no negotiating, no dickering. And you know what? Out of all of the dealers we went to this was the busiest. There were more people in here on a week day than others had during the weekend. What a concept, set a price and let the market decide if this is fair, fundamental economics.

Sincerely,
Jason

Tonight I am eating dinner and my wife hands me the King County voters pamphlet telling me to read the profile for a candidate running for office. The first thing to jump out at me is that he has one name, Goodspaceguy. The rest is pretty entertaining. Here are some interview questions from his website, http://colonizespace.blogspot.com/:

Question 1: What are your priorities, especially as they relate to parks and green spaces in Seattle?

Answer: I, Goodspaceguy, want to increase access to the parks by increasing free parking, and I want to increase access by keeping the parks always open, (for example, for lovers and for gay astronomers) and by providing showers for users of the parks.

Question 2: What do you see as the main issues facing Seattle’s parks and green spaces, and what is one innovative idea or change you think would help address these issues?

Answer: Lack of use. I, Goodspaceguy, want more free parking and showers. Sweaty people stink. I, Goodspaceguy, believe that showers would help solve this problem by enabling park users to exercise and then shower themselves promptly clean. Also I would like to establish campgrounds in some of the parks.

And here is the voters pamplet entry:

It’s hot, especially for Seattle. Today we hit an all time high of 103 degrees fahrenheit. This makes us the 3rd hottest place in the country beat only by Las Vegas and areas of southern Arizona. Work has AC but upon arriving at home the thermostat in our house looked like this:

Keep in mind this thermostat can’t display three digit numbers so it is even higher. Oh joy.

…and maybe the last. This weekend I ran my first “fun run” 5k. It was not exactly fun. 3.1 miles is not the far right? It is when every sport you have ever played from the age of 6 is a fast twitch sport that never required distance running. You know it’s not good when you are trying to beat 11 year old kids and are being passed by the 10Kers that left 20 minutes before you and run past you chatting it up like they have all the energy in the world. Me, after 1 mile, no talking as all focus is on breathing and trying not to die. I ran it in 30 minutes which is far from great but not horrible considering this was the longest I have ever run at once, distance and time, without stopping in my entire life.

The main reason I did it was a promise to the wife who is a crazy distance runner and is currently training for a marathon. I told her I would run a 5K with her at least once and I figured I might as well get it over with. I had previously flaked out on a St. Patrick’s Day Dash as I hadn’t trained enough. Training for this 5K consisted of working up from 1 mile to 2.5 miles a few days before the race. She was convinced she could convert me to a distance runner (I’ve been a sprinter my whole live) and after all this training and the run itself she is now convinced I am a horrible distance runner with little hope.

In the end it was a for a good cause, ovarian cancer, but now my distance (yup, 5K is distance for me) running career may now be officially over.

So yesterday I am sitting at home when I look out the window and see a giant cloud of smoke. Following the smoke to the origin I see a huge fire across the valley. Probably the largest I have ever seen. Here is the video:

Renton Apartment Fire from TehNrd on Vimeo.

The structure on fire turned out to be a new apartment complex under construction with no occupants. It ended up being a 5 alarm fire and there were no deaths or injuries. Sorry for the shakiness at times but it is difficult to keep the camera steady on something 5 miles away.

Last weekend we (my mom, wife, and I) headed up to Vancouver, Canada to visit a great aunt that I had never met before.  It wasn’t that awkward considering she has been sending me birthday money since I was born and I have never met her. All around a good trip. Vancouver is a nice city. Living in Seattle, people visiting all ways tell us natives how gorgeous it is here. The hills, the mountains, the sound, the greenery.  Living here your whole life you get a little spoiled and after a while it looks pretty normal. Vancouver impresses me, especially the mountains. In no other city have I seen mountains grow out of the ocean. Rumor has it that Alaska has mountains growing out of the ocean but not near any big cities (Anchorage and Juneau are not big). In Vancouver you can literally go from a metropolitan city on the water to mountains over 3,000 feet high in less than two and half miles. We were only there for a day but I can see it being a nice weekend trip.