So, I was reading that the gospel of the Flying Spaghetti Monster is to be released tomorrow, purchasable from Amazon as well as Barnes and Noble. I find the whole notion to be interesting for its shadow argument more than anything, but the whole concept is just hilarious. Anybody with any science background can discern it to be an argument wrapped in a joke. Anyhow, reading about this leads me back to the originating site. There we find the hate mail that's been posted online and the impetus for this entry.

Typically, I make it a point not to read hate mail, as it just depresses me. Sure, it's good for a laugh sometimes when Something Awful baits people into it, but in general I try to avoid it. I made the mistake of plunging headlong into the hate mail here, knowing what it would likely contain.

Now, as one comes to expect from the people who actually take time out to send hate mail, most of it is incredibly poorly written to the point of incomprehension. But what really makes me sad is the number of times people state he should be killed, or die in a nasty accident, or have other calamaties befall him. The number of people taking this seriously alone is enough to make one ill, and the malice is overwhelming.

I don't know why I expect that people would, without threatening lives, just let somebody exercise his freedom of speech. As a species are we so terrible that we can't just ignore somebody, but instead must announce intentions to kill them?

Okay, curious about the new little intel mac mini, I figured I'd stop in and listen to one being put through its paces. I again have decided that the background noise in the store is too loud to make much of a call, but it seemed pretty quiet. I may have to wait until my coworker inevitably purchases one to tell in a quiet room though.

Of peculiar interest though, was this little box of speakers Apple refers to as the Hi-Fi. Now, I'll grant I'm overly picky, but this goes a little beyond what I can dismiss as marketing and into the bold faced lies category. There is nothing about that box of tinny (yes, tin-like in quality, not small) little speakers that is remotely Hi-Fi. There were several playing at different locations in the store. The music exiting all of them was weak, hollow, and worst of all, bleeding and distorted. I actually cringed.

The weak and hollow I can possibly write off as a small set of speakers trying to fill too big a space. The Apple store is open and quite large. It isn't something that inspires confidence in me, but I could accept that in a smallish room it could possibly do okay.

The bleeding and distortion? That's hard to dismiss. Maybe the poor thing was just cranked to maximum volume and the speakers couldn't handle it. Maybe the source music they were playing was poorly encoded. I don't know, but it didn't sound like anything I want to listen to. That was seriously terrible.

That thing doesn't approach Hi-Fi. I wonder how many Apple execs would actually consider owning one.

Now go drink yourselves silly.

Friday it decides to not work. Well, about 20 Kbits/s down speed when things are going well, still the normal 400 Kbits/s up. Really weird. Saturday things are working again. Sunday we're back to the slowness. Haven't recovered a second time. Time Warner people are scheduled to show up this weekend.

I'm sad by my lack of anything resembling broadband. Most of the time pages won't finish loading. I'm in a rare good chunk, where it seems more like dial up than network problems. Boo.

[UPDATE] Playing around with various speed tests found on DSL Reports. Most of them give me results that are the suck, and watching the current speeds on my router confirm this. Oddly, speed tests from Charter Cable pretty much anywhere show multi-megabit speeds like I'd expect. So bizarre.

[UPDATE 2]Blah, up and down, up and down this week. Spoke with Earthlink, they assure me it is my cable modem. Yeah, right it is. Guess I wait around for the fixit guy to be perplexed, probably when I have good speeds during his visit. This sucks.

Okay, so it's actually the end of Engineers' Week, but better late than never, right? Hope all my fellow engineers received a little respect and admiration through the week. You certainly deserve it.

I finally got around to making the pizza recipe that GeckoFood so kindly posted recently. I actually made two of them, across two different nights, for two different groups. Here's what I found out.

First, while I don't mind some toppings on my pizza, I favor just the cheese pizza, so I made both of them cheese only. I also don't have a pizza stone, so I had to adjust the cooking times. For the first pizza, I followed the recipe nearly exactly.

The changes to the first pizza were these. I used half the dough in one crust, and stretched it out onto a 15 inch pan. There's ample dough and it doesn't get too thin, but it's not overly thick either. That's actually good, it came out right where I wanted it. I used just about half a pound of cheese, mostly low moisture mozzarella, but also a bit of colby jack for color, and a sprinkling of real parmesian to give some variance in flavor and color when cooked. Without a stone I cooked it on the pan in the middle of the preheated oven for 14 minutes at 425F. The dough was good, but a little limp. The pizza was very good, but needed a little zest.

Pizza two differed from the first one a bit. First, the crust was spread on the pan. I melted a tablespoon of butter and mixed in a teaspoon of garlic salt. I mixed this around on the crust, then cooked the crust for three minutes in a preheated 425F oven. Then I took it out, added the sauce and the cheese in the same way as before, and put it in for the same 14 minutes. The dough was very good, and a decent stiffness. I think the next one I'll try 4 or 5 minutes until I find a little more stiffness, maybe even crunch, to the crust. This pizza was fantastic though, easily the best I've made so far.

So, thanks GeckoFood, for the excellent pizza dough recipe. I think I've found one to stick with in my quest for a tasty homemade pizza.

Yay for subzero (F) temperatures and windchills down towards the -30s. I was starting to think (hope?) we wouldn't get any really cold weather around here this year.

I can't even make posts to my own journal at work, as the proxy at work has been identified as an "open proxy". I can pretty much guarantee our proxy isn't open. Maybe Slashdot is just to dumb to think that an organization with thousands of engineers and a proxy would consider using their site.

Ah well, I can read what you guys are writing throughout the day anyway. I'm too lazy to try to post through my home machine over lynx.

Eh, I've been silent on the issue for a while, but I figured what the heck, why not throw in my two cents. Everybody else is doing it.

I was nearly of two minds to the ordeal. One side of me said it probably wasn't the best idea to publish images that would provoke this sort of reaction. That was the first thought, one of those what do you expect to happen when you insult a whole religion thoughts.

After I sat down and gave it a little harder thought, I've made up my mind on a second conclusion. Screw anybody that takes offense to it. Go ahead, voice that you're upset. Great, get it out. Then get over it. Denmark has certain freedoms, like every other civilized country on this globe. Things can be published that offend people. Maybe it isn't nice, maybe it isn't even ethical, but it is a right afforded a free people to say, write, and draw what they damn well please. If you don't like it you're free to voice that, you can attempt to get other people to stop listening, but screw you if you're going to try to silence somebody.

I think I'm going to write to the Star Trib and see if they'll seek republication rights to the images. Not because I think the images are in any way wholesome or right. I think anybody that seriously published those images as a statement about Islam or Mohammed should be made into a joke like a KKK newsletter would be treated. No, I'm behind republication because I'm with free speech. Down with any group claiming we cannot say something. Say it is wrong, say it's offensive, but don't mess with our rights and liberties. Get people to stop listening, don't silence.

Mad props to the leader of Denmark who refused to make an appology for the press. That is, by far, one of the most brilliant things I've ever heard from a politician. A big screw you, you don't have a right to not be offended. We do, however, have a right to free speech. We need more of this person everywhere.

With that stance firmly in place, what the hell is up with the embassies being burned and all that? The countries hosting the embassies can't be bothered to keep their population in check enough not to destroy property of a different sovereignty? To their credit they at least tried, though I wonder how close it'd be to a declaration of war if they didn't. And hey, Islamic leaders are condemning the actions, claiming they just reinforce the stereotypes being portrayed in the cartoons. Will anybody listen?

Regarding writing CSS and JavaScript for Firefox, Mozilla, Opera, Safari, and IE:

"I swear, it's like having a class of very talented minds and one drooling retard."

She rocks.

Whew, free time. Well, borrowed time is more likely the right term. There are things I should be doing but just am not right now. Instead, I'm going to spend a little time on the after action report describing my cruise in the Caribbean with my family and fiancee.

First off, I had pretty high expectations going into this thing. Maybe it's because I knew roughly how much this was costing my parents to bring the whole family along. Maybe it was their literature and all the promises they made. Probably some combination of those with the fact that it is warm there and cold here, and vacation time is meant to be enjoyed.

Anyway, my fiancee and I were down near Milwaukee visiting our parents, who live close to one another, for Christmas. New Years day we all hopped a flight to Tampa, stayed a day there, and got on the boat. Tampa was nice, we visited Busch Gardens (my second visit there), rode roller coasters, looked at animals, bought food, and generally had a grand time. Good start.

The next day we were on the boat. We got on near the start of when they allowed people to embark. Not too long of a line early in the day, our luggage was being brought on for us, just the carry on stuff we wanted with us (or to have no chance of destruction) was with us. Our rooms were unavailable for a few hours, but we had a chance to eat and explore the boat a little while in harbor.

The ship was at once huge and cramped. For a ship, it seemed enormous. More than ten decks, elevators, two large formal dining areas, pools, a gym. On closer inspection, however, most things were crammed in pretty tight. The rooms, when we got to them, were smaller than the dorm room I had in college and was complete with a fold down bunk. Sitting areas apart from the open deck were sparse outside of places to eat. Oh, and there were some 2500 people on the ship when everybody was boarded.

At any rate, things were still new and interesting at that point. The experience started to sour later. The send off was neat, watching land disappear from view and being surrounded completely by water, as far as one could see. It wasn't the first time I've seen a view like that, I've ferried across Lake Michigan, but the water was certainly bluer. It was nice.

The first blow to the joy of the cruise came before dinner. We were informed we would be leaving Cozumel, Mexico earlier than originally planned and that our second excursion for the day we were there, horseback riding along Mayan ruins, was canceled. Well that was one of the things that everybody was really looking forward to. Nothing to do about it with the boat leaving though.

Dinner the first night, however, was exceptional. Our waiter hailed from Romainia, had a bit of an accent, but was hilarious. He would be our waiter every dinner for the cruise and ended up being one of the high points of the whole ordeal. Yes, the waiter was a high point. It was also nice that we had six people and a table for six. It was more like a restaurant than if we were mixed with others at a larger table. The other great thing about dinner was it was a starter, salad, main course, and desert. 10 pieces of silverware.

The second day was a day at sea. They filled the pool, which was
That day it dawned on me that the whole point of the ship is excess. The ship itself is excessive, and anything to be done on it had to be to excess. Sloth just laying in the sun, gluttony in the eating, greed in the casino, and so on. I just have too much restraint to enjoy going to the lengths of excess that it pandered towards. Sure, I ate too much, but I generally didn't even eat outside of meal times, those were huge enough.

The next day was our visit to the Cayman Islands. We had to ferry off the ship to land in small boats due to hurricane devastation. Leaving went smoothly and we fould ourselves in line for a quick island tour, including a turtle farm, and then off to swim with stingrays. Somehow my brother and I ended up getting split off from the rest of the family when it came time to load buses for this particular excursion. We were fortunate enough to be making the three stops in the same order, but I saw very little of anybody but my brother and the other people in our bus that day. I don't know exactly how it happened, but it was a sucky situation. On the plus side, my tour group got better guides around the island and to the stingrays. Our stingray boat people even ended up seeing a bunch of conch shells on the way back from the sandbar and stopped. One of the guides dove repeatedly, brought up some 15 conchs, and we continued on. We watched on as another crew member punched a hole in the shell with a hammer, knifed the conch, took it out, cleaned it, and cleaned up the shell. He cut up bits of the first conch which some of us, myself included, ate. It was good, sweet, almost like coconut. Then he handed out all the shells to people on the tour. Shells we'd seen at a stop maybe an hour prior selling for about $10 US each. So I got the better tour.

Getting back onto the boat really chapped my caboose. Here they are, Carnival's known they're without a pier to dock at for months, and they've completely hosed the ferry situation. We stood in line for well over an hour waiting to get on a ferry to get on the ship. We were back on an hour and a half after they supposed last ferry was supposed to run. The ship didn't leave port for another couple hours as well, and I've no doubt the people who were going to catch the very last ferry sat in line for at least three hours.

Overall, the day went well except for the ferry situation. The cruise people promised it wouldn't happen again at Cozumel though, so there was some small relief there.

So, the next day is Cozumel, getting off the boat is once again pretty easy. Sadly, I'm without my fiancee as she's on the boat resting, after a trip to the infirmary diagnosed her with bronchitis. Poor thing. I fear the cruise sucked worse for her, as she was sick for at least half of it. Not really Carnival's fault, but it detracted.

Anyhow, we passed the armed guards and we see the spot we're to meet for our excursion. The one of the two that wasn't canceled. But hey, upon getting there we find it's been canceled too. Nice. So they happily will put us in another excursion, except over half of them have already left, most of the ones people would want are full, and we had our hopes up for the catamaran racing we were signed up for. Offroading in Jeeps and snorkeling (not simultaneously, but on the same excursion) was the best they could do, so we took that for lack of anything better to do.

The guide there was actually pretty cool, the snorkeling was fun despite it nearly bringing on my brother's asthma that's been dormant for years. The reefs were all destroyed by hurricanes, but the fish were pretty. A tad underwhelming, but enjoyable. The off roading was more travelling on a road which was covered by sand by a hurricane. Not exciting. I did also get to haggle with a local shop, but ultimately I wasn't really interested in buying anything there.

Ooh, have you guessed what the ferry situation was like? I'll give you a hint, I'm not all smiley about it. We were ready and in line about two hours before the "last ferry time". Yup, we waited in line for another good hour and a half. Promises, promises. They royally screwed us with that day's excursions. The boat left a couple hours late again, though at least before our canceled excursion would have taken place.

The last day at sea sucked hard but for reasons out of anybody's control. 12 foot waves, a constantly rocking boat, and a very sick dead sun. I didn't hurl, though there were points where I wondered if I just should have and if I'd have felt better for it. Clean up crews were on hand all day, cheering the puking kids on as they spewed. That was kinda funny, except I'm a sympathetic puker, so I left as quickly as possible whenever it happened. Most of that day was spent on deck under a towel in the cold wind. On deck was infinitely better than below deck.

After it got too cold and dark out, I went to the casino, because the constantly moving lights were enough to distract me from the constant motion. I lost about $10 to the penny slots, but at least I didn't feel ill while doing so. I had fruit for dinner, despite a full menu of fantastic meals. I couldn't have stomached them. The motion finally ended early (late?) in the morning when we finally docked again in Tampa. I didn't sleep well.

Some other annoyances: the pizzeria was a counter and some heating lamps keeping cooked frozen pizzas some semblance of warm. The ice cream bar was a soft serve machine. Milk was only available at meals or through room service, no silver cow anywhere. The real ice cream at dinner was freezer burnt as of the second day, as was the sherbet. The sushi bar was open only once that I was aware of, for three hours. No matter, the sushi tasted overwhelmingly of vinegar. Why, probably because it kept the rice stuck together and from being as dry as it really was without the vinegar. Oh, and it took several complaints before anybody took care of the whole hallway where my cabin was when it smelled like puke for an entire day in the middle there.

It wasn't all bad, the service was great. Most of the time you could ask for anything and the people would try their best to do it. Once I asked where I could find some milk outside of dining hours and not through room service. The guy I asked, who appeared to be just some worker, told me to wait, ran off, and came back with two milks for me and two for my brother. That was service.

So, my conclusion, I'll never do that again. Oh well, it was an experience at least. This whole post feels rushed and devoid of many details, but it's already huge. So, if anybody has any questions, ask away.

What's more time consuming than installing Gentoo? Installing Gentoo over dialup. Ugh.

No, I haven't forgotten about posting anything here, I've just not had a free night in several weeks. Yay for the buzy holiday season. So, Merry Christmas to the lot of you, Happy New Year, and all that jazz.

I hope you all get what you're wishing for this year, be it nifty gadgets, a little peace, some needed time off with loved ones, or whatever else you may desire. Me, I'll be spending time with people I care about, hoping people enjoy what I got them, enjoying what I get, eating turducken, taking pictures, and then cruising around the carribean after New Year's.

Everybody stay warm and safe now!

Late this afternoon I got a call, rather unexpectedly, from Best Buy. It's one week before their expected date of repair for my monitor, so I was wondering what was going on. Well, I'll tell you.

As it turns out, apparently they did find something wrong with the monitor, but seeing as the monitor is 2.5 years old, a size no longer made, and so on, did not have the parts required to actually fix it. I guess they're better able to put the thing through tests than just hooking it up to a random machine. At any rate, I was informed it could not be fixed, so come on in and it was time to do the replacement thing.

Naturally, I was kind of excited, as the replacement plan states the new item has to be at least equal in features, and there just aren't 18" LCD monitors anymore, so it would have to bump to a 19". And after working on a CRT for a while, I've been itching to get back to an LCD. I figured they'd just bump me up to a 19" of the same manufacturer. That'd give me an extra inch, the same VGA input options, and take away the integrated speakers, which were nice for saving space but terrible speakers really only used for IM alerts and such. I was fine with the idea, I mean, an extra inch is nice and who really cares about the speakers. What's not to like?

Instead, I get to the store and go to the service desk, then the Geek Squad desk, wait a few minutes, and explain why I'm there. The guy said that they normally do things by feature, but since they carry no 18" LCDs and very few LCDs with integrated speakers, they'd just let me pick whatever monitor, and that if it cost more I could pay the difference. Hey, did you know that 2.5 years ago an 18" analog only LCD cost $450 on sale? That's a lot to play with in today's world of LCDs. Wow, totally different experience this time around and I didn't even have to ask.

I picked out a nice LG which cost about $20 more. We've already got one of the same model in the apartment, so I know the quality and quite like it. Nice and bright, has both DVI and VGA inputs, good color, and crisp text. It really is a superior monitor in all ways compared to the one I had prior.

The icing on the cake, though, is this. The monitor had a $40 mail in rebate this week. The girl at the customer service desk that I had to go to for the final swap printed me out a rebate receipt and the rebate form. $20 down right now for the new monitor and I'll get $40 later. I couldn't believe it.

So, now I have to write a letter off to the corporate offices, but at least it isn't all bad. They need to know there was a problem with how the initial return was handled, but once things were in motion I can't say I've been treated poorly in the least. Quite the opposite. Who'd have thought?

Oh god, we can all see where this is going, can't we? Gather round kids, and I'll tell you the beginning of a tale which I'm willing to bet is going to get a whole lot worse. Make sure you've got a bit of time on your hands though, this gets nice and long.

So, back in May of 2003, dead sun went and bought himself a nice, shiny new LCD monitor at his local Best Buy. Dead sun's desk space is a little tight, and I find LCDs are a bit easier on the eyes, so I figured what the heck. So, dead sun spills $450 on an 18" LCD monitor, which was reasonable at the time. There was a $50 rebate, so I figured what the heck, I'll get the warranty on it, because while the monitor wasn't cheap, it wasn't exactly the highest quality product I've ever purchased. As luck would have it, the next week added a second $50 rebate, so one paper exchange later I had an 18" LCD and a 3 year warranty for $400. Unheard of at the time. And part of the reason I bothered getting it at Best Buy and not online somewhere was that I wanted to have somewhere I didn't have to ship things if something went wrong. Oh, what I didn't know.

Now, the monitor was VGA only, but back then you didn't see too many DVI monitors, and certainly none that big for that little. It didn't matter at the time anyway, because I didn't have DVI on my graphics card. Both graphics cards I've had in my machine since I got the monitor have driven it cleanly though. Nice and sharp. No complaints.

No complaints until today, that is. I turn on my monitor and what do I see? Hideous amounts of ghosting. Any vertical line, when there was anything but pure white or black to the right of it, would show up no fewer than 4 times. It was unusable. I absolutely could not stand looking at it. Look here and here.

But let's not jump to conclusions, right? I mean, it could be my graphics card or something else and not the monitor. Let's be scientific about it. I dig out the CRT and hook it up to the machine. Sharp as a knife. Hook up another LCD to the machine, still sharp. Hook up the problem LCD to my laptop. Hey look, ghost lines, just not as pronounced. Good, it's down to something about the monitor.

Well, lucky me, right? I've got this 3 year warranty that's only 2 years and 6 months old. Well, first I have to find it. When I do, I see the bottom of the receipt is hanging out of their little warranty brochure. Nasty brown register paper that is close to unreadable. Thankfully, the receipt inside was at least readable, though not exactly pleasant looking. Archival quality documents those. Anyway, I had it in hand and indeed it was still under extended warranty. Maybe I didn't waste that $50 back then.

Warranty in hand, I go get the box for it out of storage, in pristine condition, and pack it up. Good. Now I'll just call up Best Buy, make sure I can just bring it in like it is with the receipt, and get hooked up with fixing it or a new monitor like promised. So I call, get a phone prompt system, navigate to customer service, wait 18 rings, and get disconnected. Huh? Oh well, I'll just bring it in.

So in it goes. I walk over to customer service, wait 10 minutes in line to find out where I need to bring it. The nice lady at the counter says to go over to the Geek Squad section of the store. I do so, and wait in line for 30 minutes there. This is getting to be fun.

After 30 minutes of waiting, I'm waved up to their counter. The waving is done by a Geek Squad guy who was helping somebody else but had looked right at me several times during the wait. What does the guy say? That monitors are handled at the Best Buy service desk which is not 10 feet from the customer service desk. Yeah, I was told to go to the wrong place and then looked at for half an hour without being told I was in the wrong place. That'd have taken what, 5 seconds from explaining to the young couple that their box was completely covered in spyware and trojans? Thanks a lot.

So off I go to the magical other counter where I should have been the entire time. 15 minutes worth of waiting and I'm talking with somebody who actually, for the first time in my visit, seems somewhat sympathetic towards my trouble. I explain the problem, pull out my camera and show him the problem, and he seems to understand the problem. Wow, this might have been worth it. No, it can't be that easy.

Somebody else wanders up to the counter where I'm actually holding civil conversation and demands to know what the issue is. I explain I'm seeing ghosting effects. I'm told that LCD monitors do that, it's normal. I say no, it didn't do it yesterday, it isn't normal. I explain it isn't when I move things around on the monitor, it's when everything is static. "Oh, well that'll still happen sometimes." is the response I get. Dick.

I explain it didn't happen before today, it didn't happen on another CRT or LCD, and it did happen on another machine. It isn't normal. I show him the pictures too. I'm told that it's probably just my camera picking up interference from the LCD. Okay, right, I just decided to waste time in Best Buy for an imaginary problem because I saw something odd through my camera. But let's blame the customer, right?

So it comes down to testing the monitor, which I can't blame them for. Lo, they can't reproduce the problem. I'm given a glance at it, let behind the counter even, but I don't see it either. Of course, I have no idea if the resolution, refresh, color depth, or any of that is the same. But the lack of reproduction there is enough for the one jerk to come just a hair short of calling me a liar. Nice customer service. They box it up and hand it back to me.

I ask what my next course of action is, since I had problems with it and they can't reproduce it. The jerk of the two is basically telling me I have none, while the nicer of the two tries to say I can try it again at home and call up customer service if I still have problems and proceed from there. Well, I'm short on proof apart from the photos, so maybe the car ride in the cold did some good for the monitor. I take it home, defeated.

I get home and, you guessed it, same lines exist. Damn, who'd have thought. So I call up the store. Same 18 rings to customer service and disconnection. Great. I ring the computer department and ask for a transfer. 10 rings later they pick up. How nice. They in turn transfer me to who they thought I needed to speak with. One hour of the most obnoxious hold music later, I hang up in disgust. Time to load it up, again, and take it in, again.

At the store the second time, and the nicer of the two guys is still there. I explain I'm still having the same problem. He takes me at my word and gets a customer service manager. They authorize a repair on it. Fortunately it has written on the service sheet being sent in and that I have a copy of that the problems exist, not just that the customer says they exist. That could help and maybe I'll have some recouse if they can't reproduce it at the repair center. The downside is they're shipping it to some repair place and won't have it back until at least the 11th of December.

Lucky for me, I have a CRT which wasn't in use, but that could have been a real problem for me. It still isn't ideal. I'm wondering what will happen should they be unable to produce the problem at the repair facility. Ship it back, call it fixed, and leave me with a problem after a few weeks of waiting? Sounds plausible.

My theory on the problem, not that it'll make a lick of a difference: large amounts of interference in my apartment. The cheap speakers that were plugged in were making crackly noise and the line out to them travelled the same path as the monitor's VGA cable. However, the other monitors' cables were run the same way in the test, yet they didn't show any problems. So maybe the shielding on the problem LCD is just crap and every other monitor in my possession is just that much better. It could happen. Regardless, the problem exists and having paid for the silly warranty I should at least be treated with a modicum of respect and competence. Since it's under warranty, I expect the problem to be solved, not just to be turned away because it wasn't reproducable on a single machine. There will be words if it comes back and does the same thing. I suspect a nasty letter is going to be written regardless of outcome, merely due to the gross incompetence and inconvenience I've been made to suffer today. Like it'll do anything though.

Anyway, lesson learned. No purchases of any non-consumable item are to be made at retailers. They're useless, and it's easier to just save some 20% and shell out online and then shop for a new item in the event of breakage outside of manufacturer's warranty. And while I've never had reason to return anything through NewEgg or the likes, I've generally heard better stories than about the brick and mortar stores, except shipping sucks.

Whew, well that was long. Anybody make it this far? Post a comment and I'll personally thank you for reading the whole rant and congratulate you on an admirable attention span.