Enforcing the law

The San Diego city council keeps making up little laws, such as no smoking on the beach, no smoking here are there, etc. While I wholeheartedly support these laws, not only are they hard to enforce, the police are stretched so thin that they can't enforce the current laws. On Sunday, my family and I went to hear a concert in La Jolla and saw several dozen dogs there. There are signs clearly posted that don't allow dogs from 9 am to 6 pm in the summer. There were lots of people, but I didn't see one police officer enforcing the law. This drives me crazy because we follow the law and didn't bring our dog; I love dogs and would love to bring my dog everywhere, but years ago, we got warned about having our dog at Mission Bay, so we've been very aware of when and where we can bring our dog.

C'est la vie!

Getting Mail.app to work the way I want

I use multiple email addresses for various reasons, but have all the mail come into one account. Mail.app handles this fine, but there is no way to link the signatures to the accounts. I seem to recall that there was a plugin to handle this awhile ago, but with Tiger mail, it wasn't needed. My switch to IMAP seems to have confused Mail and now I have to manually switch the signatures to match the account.

Not being one to do manual things over and over again, I hacked up a Mail.app plugin that sets the signature based on the from name (the signatures are named the same as the from addresses). It didn't take long and I'm not sure what I should do with this besides use it myself. Who knows what will happen in Leopard as this plugin uses undocumented APIs.

Am I such the exception that I have many email addresses and want 1 signature per address? I don't need multiple actual email accounts (Mail.app handles the signatures with those), just multiple addresses for my multiple personalities.

Target was issued a violation!

I just got a call from the San Diego County Agriculture/Weights & Measures department about my complaint of Target overcharging me. They inspected the items I indicated I was overcharged for and also found that they were overcharged. In addition, they performed a routine inspection of 50 items and were overcharged on 9 of them. If that wasn't enough, they got cited for not having the required notices about being overcharged.

I've never seen a public agency act so quickly on a complaint. While my overcharges were pennies, the inspector said that he was overcharged $5 on an item.

Scott's message to all...carefully check your receipts and be aware of the shelf prices.

Price Scanner Accuracy

It amazes me that with the ubiquitous nature of price scanners that stores are able to keep their computers and shelf tags reconciled. I'll argue that the scanners themselves are 100% accurate, but it is human error that causes the shelf tags not to match what's in the computer either due to a special ending or a mistake ended for the price. Today we were shopping at Target and picked up some candy for our trip to the movies tomorrow. We purchased 5 separate candy items (2 of one of them) and as we're checking out, I caught a mistake on 2 of them...the shelf said 3 for $4 or $1.33 each; I bought two and got charged $1.49 each. The cashier corrected the mistake. Then after we checked out, I looked at my receipt and saw the other 3 items at $0.57 each when the shelf tag said $0.44. My wife let me go over to customer service to get my $0.52 back; it wasn't the money, it was the principle. I told the associate about the issue and maybe it will be corrected, but I doubt it.

So the question is, how many unsuspecting people overpay all the time? Like a good citizen, I dutifully prepared a complaint and faxed it into the San Diego County Agriculture/Weights & Measures department.

While checking the website of San Diego County Agriculture/Weights & Measures, I saw their list of complaints to be quite short which is amazing. Several years ago, a few drug stores and grocery stores were sued for repeated violations of this and now post accuracy guarantees which probably drives the complaints down. I have used these guarantees on a number of occasions. Now if stores had electronic tags everywhere instead of paper ones, this probably wouldn't be an issue. However, the shelves would have to be wired or have everything wireless and put batteries in every tag which would be a waste. Alternatively, if each item was only in one place, it would be significantly easier to keep paper tags in line with what's in the computer because when a price change happens, there would be only one tag to change.