atomicmike » Various & Sundry

I woke up this morning to find a surprise on the floor near my bed…

Carpet prawn

As I started inventorying my gadgets, looking at all of the serial number barcodes gave me some ideas on how to improve my scanning process. I made a series of revisions to my AppleScript to let it handle serial numbers whenever possible.
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I recently purchased a USB-based barcode scanner with the intention of using it with Delicious Library to do a home inventory (their Bluetooth scanner is just to pricey for me). Unfortunately, the scanner model I purchased – a Datalogic QuickScan QD2130 – has problems acting as a keyboard with OS X. It works fine under Windows, but when connected to my Mac, it sits in a disabled mode and won’t scan any barcodes. Leafing through the manual, I noticed that it will also act as an RS-232 device over USB, and that gave me an idea…
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Some of you may remember the sinful dating ad I posted a while ago. Earlier this week, while talking to my un-boss on Messenger, I saw this ad at the bottom of the window:

What is this trying to say? If you start dating people you find on their site, all of your friends will give up on you? I can assure all of my friends: nothing will change; I gave up on you long ago.

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While talking to my brother today about my American Express card, I ran across something in their frequently asked questions that I’ve been trying to find:

What if a merchant does not accept my American Express Card?
To report incidences where merchants do not accept your American Express Card, please click here. American Express Customer Service will then follow up with the merchant to ensure that American Express Cards will be accepted in the future.

While I like the idea of encouraging merchants to accept AmEx, I’m really curious how they “ensure” it. My guess is they send around a couple of hired goons to make sure the merchant agreement gets signed, but I could be wrong.

What I really like, though, is that one of the options is “Merchant insisted on a minimum/maximum purchase amount”. It’s been a while since I’ve run into this, but I find it to be terribly obnoxious when I do (and it’s against every merchant agreement out there). My old method for dealing with those business was to buy enough to satisfy the minimum and then return whatever it was I didn’t want. That way, I only spent as much as I’d originally intended, and their stupid policy ended up costing them extra. Yes, I’m that spiteful.

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Here I am, ~~attempting~~ pretending to get some work done, when a video ad at the bottom of my ~~MSN~~ “Windows Live” Messenger window distracts me. It’s one of those creepy fake webcam ads for a dating site, and they always find some way to bother me. This one, apparently, hadn’t been designed for smaller windows, because this is what I saw:

…Sinward!

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I’ve posted the Barco for sale on Cragslist. With any luck, I’ll soon have a few extra square feet in my bedroom.

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Glancing over my site this evening, I noticed that a good portion of my posts use exclamatory punctuation in the title. This led me over to Wikipedia, since I was curious as to whether it’s considered a “mark” or a “point”. All trivialities aside, I did manage to learn two things:

I’m really a woman, given my predilection for the things.
There’s something called the interrobang, my new favorite punctuation mark‽

If anyone can manage to find a key combination for producing the interrobang on a Mac, I’ll be forever indebted. Until then, I’ll just have to keep using the Special Characters palette.

That is all.

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Eat your collective hearts out! I have the most popular Web site EVER!

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