Okay, new annoyance: What’s up with these people who have blogs with no RSS feeds? Do you want people to read it or not? Most people who read blogs read enough of them that keeping track of them without RSS feeds is a huge pain in the ass. If you still want people to visit your actual site, rather than read your posts in a blog aggregator, you can just have the RSS feed offer excerpts with links to the post.

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You would think that if any retailer had a sophisticated, user-friendly, bug-free self-check out system, it would be Wal-Mart, the biggest freaking retailer in the world. But you’d be wrong.

Their self-check out system is the buggiest one I’ve ever seen, at least my first experience with it was. I scanned an electric razor, put it in the bag. The razor did scan and showed up on the screen, but when I put it in the bag, the system said “Unauthorized item in bag.” This led to me attempting to void the razor and to try re-ringing it. But, if you void an item, this requires supervisor approval.

This leads to another problem with Wal-Mart. These self-check out things are supposed to have an employee supervising the check out lanes, so that if a customer needs assistance, they can come help. At Wal-Mart, however, there was no employee to be seen, and it took someone like five minutes to come over to help me out.

After she fixed the problem, when I went to scan the razor again, it was fine, but I had to demagnetize the anti-theft device. The problem now was that the demagnetizing strip was *right next* to the scanner, so when I tried to demag the anti-theft, it scanned the razor *two more times* requiring yet more supervisor intervention.

Of course, all this could have been easily avoided if *any* of the multitude of open lanes was an express lane. Hell, not even the self-check out lanes were express–I was waiting in line for quite a while even there, because a woman had a cart full of clothes. (I had three items.)

Conclusion: Wal-Mart evil.

In other retail bitching news: why is it that when the weather turns cold, and the snow starts to fall, every store in the area *always* runs out of rock salt (chemical de-icer). Home Depot didn’t have any; Wal-Mart didn’t have any. But two stores is my limit; I’m not going to hunt around for it any more than that. Come to think of it, no one ever has any snowblowers around this time of year either; a couple years ago, I ordered one online, because I couldn’t find any locally. What, do you have a buy a snow blower in the freaking *summer*? What happened to the laws of supply and demand? When demand is high, shouldn’t your supply be high?

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Dear interweb collective mindshare thingie: does anyone know the difficulty involved in splicing the cable of a computer speaker setup? I’m talking about replacing the male plug that you plug into the computer. The one attached to my speakers is damaged or something, and thus annoying me with its partial workingness. Thing is, I don’t want to completely wreck the speakers by slicing the plug off, only to discover that splicing is impossible.

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I was reminded by a post on the Asimov’s forum that Matt Hughes’s first Guth Bandar story, “A Little Learning,” is available to read on his website. He’s really a terrific writer, and if you haven’t tried him out yet, you owe it to yourself to do so. And hey, while you’re at it, go buy is excellent novel, Black Brillion (in which Guth Bandar plays a supporting role); it’s now available in paperback!

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