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Brand loyalty
Yesterday I went to Home Depot to pick up some attachments for my Dremel to do some glass etching. The Dremel attachments were about $8 each and I needed 4 of them according to the project instructions I had; 2 were diamond tipped and 2 were tungsten carbide. I also saw a Black & Decker kit that contained 4 diamond tipped attachments, cutting wheels, grinding attachment, etc. for $10. I bought the Black & Decker kit as well as one of the Dremel tungsten carbide attachments. I got home, used the Black & Decker kit and was able to return the Dremel attachment.
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Sprint Bill, part 2
I looked at my Sprint bill online today as it just became available. I noticed that the balance was twice that of a normal month! Wow, what that Sprint mess up now? After pouring over the bill for about 30 minutes and checking my credit card statement, it appears that Sprint never charged my card for December. What happened was this...I ordered a phone, Sprint placed a $349.99 credit on my Sprint bill as I paid that amount by credit card. Next, when my payment was due on Dec. 17 for the previous month's bill, I already had a credit on my account that exceeded this, so they didn't charge me. On the December bill, there is a charge for the phone ($349.99 + sales tax) as well as the normal charges. So, it looks like they'll catch up next month in billing me. To further complicate matters, there is a charge for $399.99 for the phone they sent me that I didn't want as well as a credit to offset that.
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Japenglish and Korenglish
The Japanese and Koreans make some pretty good products these days. However, it appears that they don't bother to have native English speeakers review text of alerts and such on their products. For instance, on my new Samsung A900 cell phone, an alert popped up that said "Connection is failed". On the products I work on, we have native speakers of the languages we localize in localize the text so that it makes sense in those languages. You'd expect that a company like Samsung could do this, but I guess not. I've seen Sony does the same thing with their CLIEs and TVs.
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San Diego Weather
I just finished walking the dog and was a bit too warm with a sweatshirt on and a light jacket. We've had a little bit of a warming trend lately where the weather has been in the mid 70s during the day. It's hard for me to imagine this being winter and even harder to remember what it's like to live in the cold. Last time I lived in the cold was almost 7 years ago when I lived in Portland, OR. That was a pretty miserable time (I only lived in Portland for a year, but prior to college, I had lived in Boston for 5 years).