Ashley Todd – The worst of the worst Part II

I simply haven’t got the words to describe this.  From yesterday’s Associated Press:

A campaign volunteer for John McCain told police she was robbed at knifepoint at an ATM and knocked down by a man who then carved a “B” in her face after noticing a sticker for the presidential candidate on her car.

Police said the woman, 20-year-old Ashley Todd of College Station, Texas, refused medical attention. An officer saw the injury, but the police report did not describe its size or severity, a police spokeswoman said.

Todd reported the attack late Wednesday. She was to be re-interviewed by investigators late Thursday.

Sounds horrible, right?  I would never wish such a thing on anyone.  Thing is, it’s pure weapons-grade bullshit.

Today’s follow-up story from KDKA:

Police investigating the alleged attack, however, began to notice some inconsistencies in her story and administered a polygraph test.  Authorities, however, declined to release the results of that test.

Investigators did say that they received photos from the ATM machine and “the photographs were verified as not being the victim making the transaction.”

This afternoon, a Pittsburgh police commander told KDKA Investigator Marty Griffin that Todd confessed to making up the story.

The commander added that Todd will face charges; but police have not commented on what those charges will be.

I do hope that she does end up facing charges, and that said charges are stiff, but I also feel enough anger to want to participate in the public ‘name and shame’ for this woman’s deplorable actions.

Albertsons.com – Took my money, ‘lost’ my order

A few years ago, I discovered that Albertsons had entered into the home grocery delivery business, and took orders online. Perfect for a super-busy and super-geeky guy like me who truly hates shopping, right?

Not just Albertsons, either; Safeway also does home-delivery, and at the time a few others did too, like HomeGrocer.com and a few others that are long since out of business.

So, I’ve been relatively spoiled until now. Sure, there were a few problems here and there, a few items not delivered or of lower quality than I would choose were I to do my shopping in person, or a substitution made that I would never have approved of, but overall it was just so convenient to order online that I’d always emphatically recommend it to friends and family.

But quite frankly it’s been going downhill a LOT lately. Safeway kept delivering moldy bread, so I switched to Albertsons exclusively, despite the fact that the Albertsons is excruciating to use – I’m a web dev in RL, so I hate that website all the more knowing that almost any team I’ve worked with in the last decade could do better.

But today just takes the cake (haha, see what I did there? I’m so funny. Okay, maybe not).

After waiting 5 hours longer than the delivery window I selected, I phoned the Albertsons customer support number, where I was gruffly told that they’d lost thousands of customer orders today and was just “one of many” with this complaint.

I guess I believe them, since I went to the site to gather information to file a formal complaint, and this is what I was presented with:

What happened is, apparently, that I made my order, received the confirmation email, had my MasterCard charged, and… Didn’t get my order because it was “Lost”. Customer service tells me that my card “will not be charged”, even though I’m looking at the statement right this minute on my other window and I can see that it has been charged.

Whether my debit card provider is waiting for the charge to be “finalized”, or it already has been, is at this point in time not simply not relevant to me. The money (nearly $700 dollars) is not available to me, meaning that I cannot feed my family until the issue is resolved. I’m told it can take 7-10 business days to get my money back, so as you might imagine I’m pretty FUCKING PISSED OFF!!!

Yes, I do understand that bad things happen on the technical side that can’t reasonably be anticipated, but that doesn’t justify the extremely poor customer service I received while trying to resolve this issue, nor does it explain the resolution process Albertsons employs (wait until the money is refunded, then resubmit your order via the “Shop my Past Purchases” page).

This is unacceptable, and is the final straw. Not only will I never shop with Albertsons online, but fortunately for me there are 6 major grocers in the nearby area that are as close or closer than the local Albertsons physical location, so I can safely say that they have lost me as a customer for all time, and it’s not in any way inconvenient to me to express my displeasure with them by going to the competition.

/rant off

Technorati Tags: albertsons.com,fail,online grocery,home grocery delivery,issues,technical problems,customer review

Why do people cheat?

Note: this entry has moved.

That’s a question I’m sure I’ll never understand the answer to, but it’s also one that comes to my mind frequently.

Specifically, I don’t understand why people attempt to cheat at C:SI combat. There have been quite a number of people who’ve done so, and most of the time it’s the most naive, blatantly obvious, pitiful kind of cheating that just makes me shake my head in disgust.

Take, for instance, this guy I was fighting several months ago in Samurai Edo. He had on an attachment that, when he pressed an attack key, would just hammer me with invisible physical spheres. Of course, he wasn’t even sly enough to make these prims silent, so my first clue was the massive collision noises I heard every time he slashed. Secondly, the collision of these prims with an avatar creates a pretty noticeable impact effect, and only someone relatively new to Second Life would fail to notice. I could quite clearly see them in View Transparent mode, so I asked him what the heck he was doing it for (since it simply would never work), and… He denied having any such device. I mean, seriously, that’s an insult to anyone’s intelligence.

Recently, Shindo mentioned to me that he’d seen someone that was using another extremely obvious cheat that allowed him to remain blocking at all times. Um, like nobody is going to notice that, right? Esprite mentioned a similar cheater to me the other day, but I’m not sure whether it’s the same person or someone else.

There have been countless other examples, but the point is that I can’t understand the confusion of thinking and absence of character that drives people to do this stuff.

So, what gets done about it? Well, here’s what I think is likely to happen to someone that is caught cheating at C:SI, though every situation is different :

• Their win/loss record could get permanently wiped, depending on the severity of the cheat. This might take some of the motivation away from cheating, though I don’t understand the cheater’s mindset enough to know for sure if that’s actually effective. This is extremely rare, but we do reserve the right to do so.
• Banning from C:SI regions, both official and otherwise. Again, this depends on the cheat as well as the region. The criteria is likely different for me banning someone from Samurai Edo, for instance, than someone else banning them from Meiji. Every region administrator has their own tolerance for cheaters, but it’s not at all uncommon to see the ban-stick come out no matter where the cheating happens. By and large, the C:SI community is made up of honorable and skillful warriors with utter disdain for and little tolerance of cheaters.
• Abuse Report : This is uncommon, but I have personally met people who claim to be using Second Life exploits on C:SI scripts and objects in order to cheat (or worse). In every case I’ve doubted that the person was telling the truth, but as they say, “tell it to the judge”. Linden Labs has the capability to verify or disprove that claim, and I believe that it is appropriate to report them.
• Public “name and shame”. If someone is caught cheating, it’s likely that the people that catch them are going to tell others they know, with the likely result that the person will no longer be welcome in many places, and will have a hard time finding good sparring partners. This probably wouldn’t bother many noob-farmers, but that’s a subject for a different day.

Okay, sorry for the long and pointless rant, I just get really irked when I see this kind of stuff. I know so many people that are dedicated, work hard, and train regularly, and I respect them for it. Cheaters, on the other hand, are just slime, and I felt like griping about it this morning

Technorati Tags: Second Life,Combat: Samurai Island