Chair design flaw

The other day I bought a kneeling chair to help my posture. I went to the Healthy Back store and bought an inexpensive one; I liked it better than the others ones. I ended up getting the Healthy Back Kneeling Chair. It wasn't until today that I discovered a huge design flaw in the chair. I was noticing that the chair wasn't rolling properly and after some detective work (and luck), I found that if I lowered the chair, the problem went away. The chair is in two pieces in an x pattern with a height adjustment (and a pivot bolt) connecting them. The problem is that all 4 casters are perpendicular only at the lowest seat position. As you raise the seat, the front part pivots causing the casters to no longer be rest flat on the floor. This is fine on carpet as the carpet and pad take up the slack, but I have hardwood and the chair doesn't roll. I went back to the store and after a brief explanation and demonstration, they let me exchange it. I got the chair I was originally going to get and because of their special sale, it only cost me $1.08 more; I still like the other chair I got because of the angle adjustment, but I'd rather not scratch my floor when it doesn't roll. I was very pleased that the store made things right.

Excellent Fry's customer service!

I'm usually the first one to bash Fry's as their customer service and shopping experience is quite poor. However, this morning, I discovered that the power supply on my server died (I unplugged 2 of the drives and it booted, so it was quite apparent that this was the plug), so where else do I get a power supply that is close? My choices are CompUSA or Fry's. Fry's is slightly closer and is open at 8 am. I got there about 8:15 am, found one power supply in the area where I saw them before, but knew there were more so I asked a guy, who happened to be the assistant store manager where they were and he took the time to walk me over there. Not only that, he asked me about what I was using it for and recommended the brand I was going to get anyway (Antec). Then he explained some of the differences in the Antec power supplies. I was quite impressed and it may have changed my attitude towards Fry's.

Why is currency programming so hard?

One of the most requested ReceiptWallet features was to be able to handle receipts in multiple currencies. OK, simple enough I thought as I could just treat all values as strings so that they have a currency symbol in them. The problem was that I had to verify that the currency symbol was valid and format the value so it is appropriate to that currency, for example, the Japanese Yen doesn't have decimals in the number. My first pass that this was pretty decent, handled dollars, Euros, Yen and a bunch of other currencies. Turns out this wasn't a complete implementation. In order to build my list of currencies, I used what are called locales on Mac OS X to get the currency associated with a locale. Problem is that some currencies aren't associated with a locale, such as Swiss Francs (I have no idea why). So I had to find a way to get a list of currencies and do some formatting magic. I think that I managed to do this, but I just don't understand why it was so hard. Is it inconceivable that people would want to use multiple currencies on one machine? If it was easy, everyone would have this type of code in their programs!

Support didn't treat me like an idiot

I noticed that my internet connection was slow, so I rebooted my cable modem and the modem didn't come back online, so I called Time Warner Cable Business Class (I have a business account). The guy I spoke with didn't have me do all the stupid stuff like reboot my computer, turn around 3 times, blame the computer, etc. He tested the cable modem and found (after it came back online) that there was high packet loss ( > 60%). While the problem hasn't been resolved, I'm confident that it will be soon. Time Warner has always been pretty responsive, especially on a business account; one time they wanted to come out a few hours after I called to replace the cable modem (I was actually out of town), but then called me back a few times to give me status and the problem ended up being something they could solve on the headend.

UPDATE: I got a call back and the earliest appointment they had was tomorrow morning, but they are putting in an emergency work order for this afternoon which means someone will be here between about 12 pm and sometime this evening. Uggh. Hard to work without the internet. What did we do before the internet?