Meet the “Clyde Toast Ghost”. For those of you that are too young (or too old) to remember, Clyde is the orange ghost from the best arcade game ever…Pac-Man.

I am selling the “Clyde Toast Ghost” on ebay! C’mon big money, big money.

Pssst, 100% of the final sale price will support the Clinton Bush Haiti Fund.

Here’s the link to the ebay listing.

So I looked at what they have, registered and placed an order. I am thinking I should cancel my order though!

Read the email they sent me, are these people going to teach my kids? I am having second thoughts now.

Click to enlarge

PapaGeek.

Baby's got shoes

Remember that letter I sent to Stride Rite? Well I got their attention I guess.

The District Manager called and left a message on my voice mail at work. He was very professional, he apologized for the way I was treated and said he will be contacting the manager of the store to let them know I will be stopping by. He even gave me the choice of exchanging the shoes or getting a refund.

We were in the store for maybe a total of 15 min! I wish all shopping was done like that. The first shoe my wife pointed at was not available, the second one was just great. We paid about 6 bucks; the difference in price and we were out the door. Oh oh, as we were leaving, we were advised that we should bring our daughter back in a month and a half to have her feet measured again. By the way, according to the guy at the store, this should be done every 6 weeks until the kid is 12 years old.

I quickly did the math; 1 Year=52weeks, 1.5 months = 6 weeks, 52/6=8.666. The shoes they sell are $40 and above, that’s about $350 a year for 12 years! Yup, $4200. Oh wait I have two kids, $8400 spent on shoes during the first 12 years of my kids’ life.

Haha, and you worry about sending your kids to college.

PapaGeek.

Baby needs shoes!

When an associate promises to exchange the shoes and the manager refuses, send a complaint letter to corporate. The ball is on Stride Rite’s court, I am sending them a letter that you can read after the jump.

Dear Stride Rite:

Allow me to begin by congratulating you on the quality of products you offer. I was first exposed to Stride Rite baby shoes during the first few weeks after my daughter was born. I appreciated the quality of your shoes and decided that my daughter’s first (real walking) shoes will have to be of the same brand.

In April of 2008, my wife and I took our daughter to one of your stores in the area. We did not find what we were looking for at that location, so we decided to drive to another one of your stores on the other side of town.

The sales person seemed very knowledgeable and I wouldn’t be surprised if she is one of your top performers; she sold us two pairs of shoes when we only needed one. I totally understand businesses offering incentives to employees that up sell their products; I don’t have any problem with it unless there are lies and deception hiding underneath.

The sales person encouraged us to take advantage of the “Buy One Get Second Pair ½ Off” sale. I informed her that I did not know how fast my daughter’s feet will grow since I didn’t have much experience in that field. She proceeded to educate me, explaining that by summertime my daughter will need size X and brought us some summer style shoes.

I was still reluctant, “I do not want to get stuck with this pair of summer shoes that my daughter might never wear” I said to the sales person. She replied by assuring me that if that is the case, we could bring them back and exchange them for a different pair. She said “as long as they have not been worn we will exchange them”. I asked “even if I bring them back in December” to which she replied “Yes, just bring them back and exchange them for a winter style shoe”. OK, I guess I am not taking any risks here; the worst that can happen is I have to drive back to the store few months later to exchange the shoes.

Back in November 2008, I called the store to ask if I needed to bring a receipt with me in order to exchange the shoes. To my unpleasant surprise and in a cold blooded manner, the lady informed me that they don’t exchange items that have been purchased more than 30 days ago. I immediately asked to speak to the store manager to whom I explained my story. Again, cold blooded; I got the old “Our policy…” spiel. I tried to explain to the manager that I WOULD NOT HAVE BOUGHT the shoes if the SALES PERSON didn’t LIE TO ME. The manager actually mentioned that she won’t take the shoes back from me because she is not stocking summer style shoes. I would like to know how that became my problem. The manager pretty much shrugged it off and suggested I contact the corporate office; here I am a couple months later sending you a letter.

I would also like to share with you that we just had a baby boy earlier this month and that I am taking the liberty to post this letter on my blog – TheGeekParents.com. How you act in response to my letter will potentially affect many parents perception of your company.

I am hopeful you will agree with me when I say that I have received less than stellar service. I am also looking forward to seeing you correct this. My daughter is due for a new pair of shoes; I will get her a new pair within the next two weeks, I hope you would have regained me as one of your loyal customers by then.

Sincerely,

End of letter.

Well folks, stay tuned for part II.

PapaGeek.

     Switch To ubuntu Today!

No more excuses left, you should try ubuntu NOW.

OK, listen to this: The Software is free, the guide is now available as free download, you can even have them send you a free Live CD. When I received mine it came with some stickers; so cool. By the way, Live CD means you can run it from the CD itself if you choose not to install it. What are you waiting for? Go grab those downloads.

Here’s the link, you’ll find it all there. ubuntu is probably the most user friendly and most popular Linux distro out there, I have it installed it on my desktop computer at home along with three other Operating Systems. Initially I just wanted to try it, and try a Quad boot

I shamefully admit that I haven’t been booting from that partition much lately, especially since I got my Tablet PC – I didn’t install ubuntu on that one. I will be slicking the hard drive and installing a fresh copy of ubuntu along with XP and Win7. I will also be using Parallels on Linux, just to satisfy the occasional XP cravings without having to restart the system. Oh yeah! ubuntu will be the default OS on that boot loader. So this couldn’t have come at a better time.

PapaGeek.

One of the websites I visited prompted me to install the Flash Plug-in, not something I haven’t seen before. OK, let’s install the plugin, it should only take a minute right? Scratch that!

But, but but…

My G:/ drive; the partition I have devoted to Windows 7 still has 3.45 GB of free space. My mind immediatly goes into “Blame the Beta” mode. Is it possible that Win 7 can’t do simple Math? A quick google action revealed that this is an Adobe Flash bug. The Flash Plugin installation freaks out when it can’t see the Holy C:/ drive.

Arghhh! Microsoft PLEASE DO AWAY WITH THIS DRIVE MAPPING CRAP. Althought it is not a Microsoft’s fault here, it could have been avoided.

OK, enough complaining. Time to talk about how to resolve this. Insert a flash drive in, Sweet! It took the letter  ”C”, If it does not, you need to go to “Disk Management” and change the letter drive.

Now that my Flash Drive is known as C:/, let’s go back to installing the Plugin. I need to close Google Chrome. OK, I’ll save this post and be right back.

And we’re back in business!

So, for some weird and unknown reason, the Plugin needed to see a C:/ drive, even if it was not really needed for the installation. Whatever Adobe!, I’ll go back to my Saturday morning browsing now. Oh wait, do I hear a baby crying? hmm, time to change a diaper I guess.

PapaGeek.

The stormy days are here! My mother in-law went back home last Sunday, she’s been a lot of help but all good things must come to an end. I know a lot of you are gonna be perplexed. Yes I do get along with my mother in-law!

So back to the “Paternity Leave”. I went to talk to our HR department about what my options are. Here’s the way it works, the only to get paid is to use my vacation/personal days. I remember watching a documentary addressing parental leave, I remember thinking they got it made in Europe.

Here’s a comparaison courtesy of Wikipedia. See for yourself how the U.S. fairs in this area.

PapaGeek.

Update: It doesn’t seem to work on XP, It works fine on Vista and Win7. I will investigate further and post my findings.

I have family members in France and Morocco. The last time I went to visit my parents in Morocco, I brought a Netgear Skype phone and left it there. My parents have the phone connected to their router at all times, which means they are always connected to Skype. All I have to do is launch Skype on my PC and double click their name on my contact list. That’s the cheapest per minute rate I have found, duh…it’s free!

To call France on the other hand, I just purchase Skype Credit and use it as needed. I was considering getting a Skype out account; which would allow me to call regular landlines for a small monthly fee but I managed to convince the other party to run Skype on their computer.

Did I mention that I bought a Bluetooth headset (for $21.99) to use with Skype? It’s a Samsung WEP301, Oh! and I just mailed the $20 rebate form for that! This headset will end up costing me less than 2 bucks!

It works pretty good; the volume could be a little louder but it’s not bad, I don’t have to be on that leash anymore. The “Answer” button works with Skype too and you can also use it to disconnect or initiate a call. I was not expecting it to perform this well.

I am also working on putting Skype on a Flash Drive, for those of you that don’t want to (or can’t)  install it on their computer, stay tuned. A guide might be coming in about 10 days. I know that some U3 loaded USB Drives ship with Skype already installed but that’s not what I am looking for.

PapaGeek.

Weewee Blockers

One of my favorite sites to hunt for good deals is Slickdeals.net, I have a few Deal alerts set up on that site. To set up a Deal alert, you simply provide a keyword and tell it that you want an instant notification to your email address.

One of my alerts consists of one keyword: “Baby”. I found out this is a great way to know about a lot of the baby related products out there, I mean some of them I didn’t even know they existed, weewee blockers is a great example!

My son is not even two weeks old yet and I learned my lesson very well. Be very careful when you’re changing that diaper, those wipes can get very cold and you know what happens after that. My son wants to be a fireman, he told me…well you know what I mean.

Sure, nobody wants their baby peeing all over the changing table nor having to change clothes at every diaper change but GIVE ME A BREAK! A piece of cloth does the job just fine, plus how many do you need? I say get a towel and a pair of scissors and you got yourself MANY weewee blockers on the cheap.

PapaGeek.

Click image to enlarge.

As soon as we learned we were pregnant with our second baby I started thinking of a simple way to track feeding times. I knew it had to be a touch-screen solution for it to be convenient, and since I have a 3com Audrey internet appliance; I thought I’ll just put together a Javascript based timer and have it all web based. Sweet, sounds like a great idea, how do I execute it?

Given that I am not a programmer, I swiftly abandoned that idea and started looking for other solutions. During my quest, I found a company that makes similar apps for the almighty iPhone, I gotta admit I was tempted (for a total of 2.3 seconds) to buy an iPhone.

And then…I found some free applications for the old trustworthy Palm Pilot, well it’s not so trustworthy anymore but I wanted to say that cause it sounded good. I dusted my Palm V and installed the first App; Contraction Timer.

Contraction Timer got the job done! Very simple and straight forward, it’s got 2 touch-screen buttons; [Start] and [Stop]. You push the first button when you feel the contraction and hit the second one when you start breathing better again. The software displays how long the contractions are lasting and how frequent they are. The App also has a beep alert to let you know it is time to head to the hospital.

I am working on installing the Feeding Timer, I will let you know how that goes. Meanwhile, if you have any comments or suggestions the comments section is there just for that reason.

PapaGeek.