Also, the link in the email goes to a server that doesn’t exist.

When I presented the battery to the returns clerk, he looked at it and was a bit suspicious as he said that Lenmar batteries usually have a label on them with the Lenmar name. At that point, things began to click. When I brought the battery home, it looked identical to the battery I already had with the exception that the code on it was a little different. The package said 850 mA whereas the battery (and the ones in the phones) said 800 mA. The clerk went back and retrieved another battery and it was yellow (the ones I had including the replacement I bought were white) with a Lenmar label on it.

Now it was Fry’s word against mine; I said that I bought the battery I was returning. I couldn’t prove I hadn’t swapped the batteries and they couldn’t prove that the battery I took home was the real Lenmar one. The clerk asked his manager and the manager said to go ahead and accept the return. That was a big relief; I almost had to eat $10 for the battery. So it looks like someone swapped the battery in the store (the packages for the batteries only has a stable at the top and you can easily slip the battery out). Normally this kind of theft just impacts the store (and the consumer indirectly with higher prices), but in this case, I almost got stuck with the bill.

Normally Fry’s is an easy target for me to pick on as their staff isn’t the most helpful, some of their sales tactics are questionable (I’ve seen returned items shrink wrapped and resold as new), and I only shop there as a last resort. However, in this case, I was quite pleased with their customer service. Maybe this is way manufacturers put products in the bubble packaging to prevent people from stealing like this.

I think we do a reasonable amount to conserve; we run our air conditioning a few times a year, we turn off lights, and I turn off a bunch of my computer equipment at the end of the day. However, can more be done? I was at Fry’s last week getting a power strip to combine a bunch of other strips and picked up 2 little energy conservation helpers.

The first is a Belkin Conserve Socket which I bought not because of the energy savings aspect, but because I forget to unplug chargers for my RC car and helicopters. I am always afraid of leaving them when I’m not around as the warnings on the labels are pretty scary. Also, I had 2 chargers for my RC car melt and the batteries start overheating. This gadget should give me a little piece of mind.

The second was an APC 4 outlet surge protector with a timer. You basically set on and off times for it and it switches off power to the outlets. I was trying to figure out where to place it to handle a few chargers I have lying around (outlets are kind of scarce in my office) when today I figured out what to do with it.

Like a lot of geeks, I have a large collection of equipment centered around the TV. I have a Mac Mini for a media center, 2 El Gato EyeTVs, a Time Capsule, an Ooma, a cordless phone, a cable modem, 3 Squeezebox devices, 2 audio distribution units, 1 amplifier, 2 8 port gigabit switches, a Wii, a coax amplifier and a TV. With all that stuff, what could I have automatically turn off and what was consuming the most? While much of the equipment uses wall warts and uses a little power each, the big consumers are probably the audio distribution units, so I plugged those 2 into the timer surge protector as well as 2 other small devices. That takes care of cutting power to 4 devices. Next, I unplugged the amplifier I don’t use.

Lastly, I have an APC UPS that has a master controlled outlet which shuts down power to 3 other outlets when the main device draws very little power. I set my Mac Mini as the master unit and used Energy Saver to set a schedule for it to shut down around 11:30 pm and wake up around 4:30 am in time to start processing TV shows that it recorded. Then I plugged in the EyeTVs and a hard drive into the controlled outlets. So of all the mess I have, I just set 8 devices to stop drawing power for at least 5 hours a day (the audio stuff I set to come on even later). While this isn’t the end of my quest to reduce power consumption, it is a decent start.

I like the idea of the timer controlled power strips, so I may pick up a few more of those.

Too bad SDGE stopped sending the real time power consumption data to Google. I’ll have to search to see if something is available as I have a smart meter and it would be neat to see if my efforts are doing something.

When I’ve interviewed people, I’m not clever enough to come up with this types of computer science questions, so I’ve taken different routes and try to get at how a person thinks and what they can learn. One of the most important things I learned in college was how to teach myself anything which has proven to be an asset. A number of years ago, I had an interview at Apple for AppleWorks and I basically didn’t get the job because I didn’t know C++. The next interview I went on, I don’t believe I was asked highly technical questions and was hired. Within 2 weeks, I learned C++ and was off and running.

There is no magic to interviewing and maybe computer science questions are great for candidates right out of college, but do they help adequately screen candidates? If the candidate gets the CS questions wrong, could a good candidate be slipping through the cracks? Possibly. I find that if I probe a person for specifics on what they have on their resume, I can get a pretty good idea of how the candidate will work.

To each his own; there are no right answers or formulas for finding and retaining good employees/contractors.

On my run today, I saw a teenager not bother to slow down and make a left turn at this intersection. He didn’t seem to care that there was a stop sign. This intersection is getting more and more dangerous for me as I have no idea if people will stop. I decided to stop for a minute on my way back and take a video of a car running the stop sign. I didn’t have to wait long for this to happen; maybe 15 seconds.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Unfortunately, Amazon notified California based affiliates today that they’re cutting us off if the state passes a law regarding online commerce. The law is a bit of duplicate regulation as California residents are already required to pay a use tax for goods purchased out of the tax; it appears that the law is putting the burden of collection on a company that doesn’t even have offices in the state. The law argues that affiliates constitute a California presence for Amazon and thus it has to collect taxes.

So us little people get punished because the state can’t enforce the current law on the books. Lovely.

I decided to try my luck and see if I could get the lines on the account rearranged to move included features to the lines that I was keeping. The rep said that since the plan was so old, the changes couldn’t be made which I completely understood. However, when I checked the account, the changes I requested were actually made! I was surprised, but pleased (I did verify this with a Sprint reseller).

After all that, my parents actually ported out their phones to Verizon so my Dad could get an iPhone. When I got my latest bill, it looked as if Sprint billed me a bit more than I expected. It should have been the regular monthly fee + the ETF for my line (Sprint bills one month in advance, so it was the normal fee without additional lines). When I contact Sprint on Friday, I got email back Saturday with an apology and a credit applied to my account; not just the credit I was supposed to get, but credits for other stuff that I won’t see about until the next bill shows up. That was great service to respond so quickly and fix the issue.

Thanks, Sprint!

As Jason Snell tweeted a few days ago:

And with that, I declare the NDA completely dead. RT @daringfireball iOS 5 Screenshots and Tidbits at Engadget: df4.us/hqy

There are, unfortunately, no consequences to these NDA violations as Apple wouldn’t accomplish anything by suing the small developer. However, that is no reason to violate it as it won’t help any developer get ahead (I doubt the sites that have published information have paid the developers).

The first point of the Scout Law is “A scout is trustworthy”. I always try to live by this and this includes everything I have done in every aspect of my life including business and work. I wish that more people, especially those in my field, would take trust seriously.

I mentioned this to the attendant and he said that they ask for it for a survey and also ask it for of cash visitors as well. Yeah, that’s kind of the point as the zip code could be used to link the survey directly to the credit card user.

We’ll see what SeaWorld has to say with the message I sent them. They better act quickly otherwise the fines could start adding up. Too bad I can’t get paid for reporting the issue!