With the rising cost of gas and other necessary expenses, I’ve been looking for ways we can cut back and/or save money on every day things. One of which is our movie collecting — we love movies! Jim and I buy movies all the time (at least one/two per week), but we have so many that we buy and watch once or maybe twice. I’ve wondered if it would be cheaper just to rent movies that we want to “try” and buy it later if we really like it.
I’ve been looking at several movie-by-mail services, like NetFlix and what have you. A couple of my coworkers belong to these types of services and I’ve been asking how they like them, how the service works, etc. We are always getting SunCoast and Blockbuster coupons in the mail, and if memory serves me, they have similar services.
A spokesman for the pawnbroker says that this move attracts customers who wouldn’t want to pawn jewelry or the like, but a valuable bottle of wine is discreet enough to remove from the home.
Funny thing … in our house, alcohol would be one of the first things we’d notice missing!
There’s a Monty Python skit in there somewhere, I just know it!
There are a lot of things I wanted to cover today, unfortunately I wasn’t able to finish this post prior to class this afternoon, so bear with me … there’s a lot here.
Those of you who are local I’m sure have been following the story of the busload of Marines that overturned Sunday. They were from E Co., Anti-Terrorism Battalion, 4th Marine Division, returning from a weekend training exercise. I read this morning about Lance Cpl. David Miles, the Marine that passed away Monday afternoon from his injuries. However, even in death he still served others.
“According to his mom, he was very adamant about (donating) his organs … so the mom is very adamant about carrying out his wishes of harvesting as many of his organs as possible.”
Honestly the grace and bravery that our finest men and women exhibit every day never cease to amaze me. Too bad the liberal media doesn’t show them more often!
Verizon Cancels Returning Marines’ Cellphones, Gives Their Number Away, Charges Them $500
Two Marines, a husband and wife, found Verizon had an unpleasant welcome-home gift waiting for them when they got back from serving in Iraq: canceled cellphones, a $500bill, and their phone numbers were given to other people. Under the Service Members Civil Relief Act, when a soldier goes off to war, they’re able to send their deployment letters to their service companies and get their service put on hold. Apparently in the case of Haley Katz and her husband, that letter wasn’t good enough. When they complained and reached a manager, the manager told them ” it was their fault they owed the money”, and then hung up on them. Read their letter as published in Stars and Stripes, inside…
At 3:30 a.m (Iraq time), [recently], my husband and I called Verizon Wireless to reactivate our phones, as we are returning home [from Iraq] soon and wanted to catch the company during its business hours. Upon speaking with a customer service representative, it became apparent that Verizon not only suspended our contracts, it disconnected our phones and gave our numbers away to other customers.
What is truly amazing is that the company took the letters our commanding officers signed regarding our deployment dates, and deemed the letters not worthy of suspending our contracts. It continued to charge us for those months without notifying us and when we did not pay, it disconnected the lines.
Long story short, when we called to reactivate our phones they told us our numbers no longer existed and that we owed them nearly $500!
When we asked to speak to a manager, we were told nothing could be done. When we did actually speak to a manager we were told it was our fault that we owed the money. The manager then proceeded to say “We’re sorry but nothing can be done for you. Goodbye.”
We were hung up on … in Iraq … at 3:30 in the morning. Real professional.
We spoke to another manager who was courteous enough to recredit our accounts and cut all remaining ties with their service. We are no longer with Verizon Wireless.
For all of the soldiers, sailors, Marines and airmen out there, make sure you are checking up on the status of your accounts. Apparently, a letter from your command stating you are deploying is not enough these days. And aside from seeing service members off at Marine Corps Air Station Cherry Point (N.C.), I am not sure what else they are looking for.
Marine 2nd Lt. Haley Katz
Camp Fallujah, Iraq
I’ve heard horror stories about Verizon and their crappy customer service for years, but this takes the cake!
And speaking of human depravity, there’s the Berkley protesters. We’ve all heard of this one, right? Today, Rachel Lucas gave plenty examples of and commented on the ‘fine minds’ (and I say that lightly!) objecting to our nation’s finest.
Somebody please put these morons out of our misery!
Update: Please see this recent post regarding this WordPress function.
I wanted to help out a friend earlier tonight by importing a blogroll from a hobby site (running the latest version of WordPress) to hers (also running the latest version of WordPress). For the life of me, I could have sworn that WordPress had the ability to export to OPML.
Boy was I wrong! Not only did WordPress NOT have the ability to export blogrolls to OPML, it had absolutely no blogroll exporting capabilities at ALL.
I got the bright idea that maybe I could just export directly from phpMyAdmin. After looking at the structure of my WP tables, I decided that I didn’t want to sit and have to go through the exported data and re-structure by hand.
This was quickly becoming a lot more complicated than I needed. “OK,” I thought to myself, “No problem, I’ll just find a WordPress plugin to do this for me, no biggie.”
Google to the rescue! Or not …
After about an hour of searching and finding absolutely nothing — or rather, nothing helpful — on the topic in the WordPress support forums, in the WordPress Codex, or on the web in general, I decided to broaden my search from exporting blogrolls in WordPress into OPML format to just “export blogroll in WordPress.”
The first and pretty much ONLY helpful hit was for a plugin to export a WordPress blogroll for del.icio.us. It wasn’t exactly what I needed, but after looking at the plugin’s code, I decided that the quickest way to get to where I wanted to be was to hack up that plugin.
It’s pretty simple and I’m surprised that there aren’t more out there like it. It has one configuration option: whether to export all links ‘as is’ or export by a specific category or public/private links. Of course, the last version of WordPress that it supported (listed on the website) is WP 2.2, and the links/categories structure has been redone recently so exporting by category was not an option (and didn’t work at all).
I would have to re-categorize by hand once they were imported — not the solution I wanted, but by this point I would be happy not to have to add each link by hand!
Put on your coding hat
I had to re-design the plugin’s output format, as del.icio.us’ format was nowhere near OPML-friendly (and by this point I had wasted over 2 hours on this crap). So, this is what I did:
I made sure that the export option was set to export all links:
/* ********************************* */
/* [ THIS IS THE VARIABLE TO EDIT: ] */
/* ********************************* */
$option = “”;
Then, in the “DO NOT EDIT BEYOND THIS POINT” section, I modified the export_blogroll_admin() function to this. (could not post code in here, click the link to view .txt file!)
Afterthoughts, FYI…
I snagged the OPML formatting from one of my blogrolls on Blogrolling.com. (If you login, go to “Get Code”.) The ‘lastmod’ time is of course VERY off, but it doesn’t matter once it’s imported into WordPress.
Of course, any URLs with ampersands in them WILL NOT import, so remember to convert those &’s to & — also, look out for any link titles with odd characters in them, those will not import either.
It’s more complicated than it needs to be, and honestly I’m surprised that this capability is not already available in WordPress. While I had to go a round-abouts way to do this, it’s a bit overkill IMO. Think: Fat guy in a little coat meets midget in plus size clothing. (RIP Chris Farley)
Both Beth and Uncle Monster have sent this to me. This is perhaps one of the best (cutest!) explanations of Star Wars Episode IV. Made by www.fistofblog.com, featuring his 3 year old daughter:
Posted by Nicki on February 26th, 2008 at 10:37 am
I’ve heard horror stories about Verizon and their crappy customer service for years, but this takes the cake!
And last but not least, a funny bit courtesy of 
