Bill Rowell robs two conveinence stores and has a drug problem. Oh yeah, and I’m a wedding DJ too. Alas, this really isn’t me. I’m not 49 and don’t live in Maine. And I’m in California right now, so robbing a store in Maine would be rather difficult.
I’m in California this week for work and after my day was over, I was sitting in my hotel room flipping through random channels. I happened upon the Larry King Live interview with Paris Hilton. The first thing I noticed, as I don’t watch Larry King (nor do I pay much attention to Paris Hilton…though her homemade movie is neat…), was that the backdrop of his set looks like a complete Lite-Brite pattern! Anyone else ever notice this?
I’ve noticed on television lately (the little that I actually do watch) that there are an increasingly number of advertisements for college loans. When I was in college, you got a loan through the school, the government, or Sallie Mae. Now, you can get one from pretty much anywhere. The latest one I saw from Chase. Another I saw the other day from a company I didn’t recognize. What I’m wondering is in this day and age of borrowing until you’re blue in the face, have things gone to far? Do credit companies really need to target people with NO income at all to make a buck? I realize college is getting more and more expensive (for what reason I’m not sure), and with Sallie Mae recently being bought out, are college students going to get a raw deal? Back when I finished school (only 7 years ago), I had classmates who graduated with $50,000 in debt, which I thought was incredible. Now, it looks like students (non-med students that is) will graduate with potentially hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt.
It seems to me that someone needs to take a hard look at the state of affording a college education. My guess is that less and less kids will go to college (that is if someone educates them that at some point, being $300,000 in debt is insane) because they can’t afford it. And I’m not talking about inner city kids or minorities, I’m talking your regular good to do, got good grades students. At some point we, as a community, need to say enough is enough and we aren’t going to pay for this stuff.
It appears that testing PayPal’s Web Payments Pro in their Sandbox doesn’t work like it would in a live environment. It won’t return error codes for address verification failures out of the box unless you set it up to do so. I was lucky enough to get a response in the developer forum that showed me this blog post on how to test AVS failures.
Also, it doesn’t look like you can test Discover Card or American Express credit cards in the Sandbox either. If there are any PayPal developers out there that come across this blog post, that’s a feature I’d like to see! I need to know that my code works 100% before it goes live!
For this upcoming Halloween, we’re moving the Morbid Industries warehouse out to California. It was a business decision a long time coming. Shipping product from China to the East Coast and then back across the country was getting expensive. A lot of our customers are on the West Coast too, so we were basically shipping product in containers across the country for nothing. So, because we were doing this, and we use Escalate Retail’s Ecometry for order management, I needed to build a shipping station to send out there. Ecometry sends you to Agilysys, for pre-built shipping stations, however, they’re really expensive and we were looking to save some money. I had read on the Ecometry Google newsgroup that people had built their own, so I decided to brave it and do the same.
I’d like to thank a couple of people for there help right off the bat. Paul, a support engineer from Datalogic/PSC was a big help getting the right interface cable I needed and helping with programming the scanner to read our barcodes properly. Also, Daniel Lively for his suggestions on the Ecometry Google newsgroup. Thanks guys!
Here’s the list of parts I used:
Pretty much you can hook up the entire thing and it will work. For the scale, you need to set your COM port to the following settings:
For programming the scanner, you can find documentation on Datalogic’s website here. The programming guide that I needed for the model scanner I purchased is here. Depending on the scanner model you use, you’ll need a different programming guide so that you can scan the right bar codes for your application. We enabled Code 39 and Code 128 since we scan FedEx bar codes.
A couple of additional notes. I’m not sure I actually needed the SIIG Cyber 2S1P card as I would have had enough ports to hook up all the equipment. It was recommended on the newsgroup to get one for the scale. I was also told an easier setup with the PSC Powerscans is to use PSSR-7000 and a USB interface. They’re really easy to set up I guess. Also, in place of the Zebra Z4MPlus thermal printer, you can supposedly use a Zebra S600 or a S400, which are cheaper.
Most of the parts I sourced on eBay. I think all said and done, we paid less than $1,000 for the entire shipping station. The computer was free as we had one kicking around, but you can use pretty much any computer running Windows 2000 or Windows XP. I just recommend having a bit of memory in it so it isn’t a complete slug. I believe this is significantly less expensive than buying a pre-built shipping station through Agilysys. It’s faster than the one we originally bought from them too!
I found this one via Reddit today and found it quite fascinating. Karen Lodrick, a native of San Francisco, was a victim of identity theft and had been trying to get herself out of the mess for nearly six months. A regular visit to Starbucks, where she ordered a Latte, saw a familiar light-brown suede coat from a security camera photo she had seen at her bank identifying the person who had stolen identity as not being herself. After a call to 911, a lengthy chase, and finally the police finding her in a Walgreens parking garage, she was caught. I have to give Karen credit for taking advantage of the situation and chasing her down so she could get her life back. Makes you think twice about throwing those credit card applications away in the trash before shredding them or ripping them up.
Typically you can find pretty good deals on computer hardware online. Usually I check Newegg and ZipZoomfly for what I’m looking for and figure out where the best deal is. This time around, I decided I’d just try ZipZoomfly out since I found what I was looking for at a reasonable price. Both items were marked as in stock and for twenty dollars for overnight shipping and I’d have my new hardware the next day. Yay! When the package arrived, I wasn’t happy. Only one item had arrived.
I call their customer service to ask what is going on. I was told after being put on hold that the second item was no longer in stock. So I ask why I wasn’t notified. She didn’t know. Needing the replacement now, I asked what they were going to do to get me the part. She didn’t offer anything and just said they didn’t have it. So I started to get a little more irate about the whole thing saying I had a hardware failure and this was the replacement I was expecting for my overnight delivery cost. She puts me on hold for 5 minutes then comes back to say there going to swap it out for the next model up. I check the specs, tell her I’m happy with that, and she puts the order through telling me it’ll be put in immediately and I’ll have it the next day (today).
Today rolls around. No email with an order number or tracking number. I call them again. A new rep checks on my order (putting me on hold again for 5 minutes) then tells me they didn’t put the order in due to a “technical” issue and that it was really being put in today. I ask why I wasn’t notified of this and she said she didn’t know. So I tell her I think this is pretty lousy customer service and all she has to say is I’m sorry. I had to basically tell her I wanted a phone call when the order went through so I could have a tracking number. I wasn’t calling them back.
Customer service is all about the customer. Zipzoomfly doesn’t seem to realize that or really care. That’s why I’ll take my business to Newegg or another e-tailer in the future.
We’re integrating Paypal’s Web Payments Pro into a new e-commerce site we’re building. To test, we set up our Paypal Sandbox account and began the process of setting up the Web Payments Pro account that we’d need. Interestingly, when I got to the part when it asked for a social security number, it wouldn’t validate the number. Also, there was no business owner address displayed there, which I believe was the cause of the issue. After about an hour and change on the phone trying to talk to the right technical person at Paypal, I was finally told that I could put in a fake social security number, as long as it began with ‘111’. Wow, awesome. Off and running. Now wouldn’t that be useful information in the development docs or maybe even on the site?