Dossy's Blog

Over the last year, I’ve accumulated several “one-shot” Visa credit cards in the form of “gift cards” and manufacturer rebates. I decided today would be the day I’d try to spend some of these. I went to one of my favorite online shopping destinations, Amazon.com, picked out some items, and went to go pay with these cards. This should be no big deal, right? Right???

So, I picked out an item that I couldn’t pay for with a single gift card. No problem, I’ll just tell Amazon to charge two of these cards and that would be that, right? Only, I discover that I can only choose one credit card to pay for the transaction. Ha, ha, this must be a joke, right? It’s 2009, you can’t expect me to believe that the company that basically pioneered e-commerce hasn’t figured out how to implement split billing?

Out of disappointment, I decided to locate the same item on Buy.com, where I discovered that they also only allow you to choose one credit card as payment. I did notice that both Amazon and Buy.com allow you to use multiple site-specific gift certificates to pay for an order, so I decided to work around the problem by ordering a Buy.com gift certificate for $50, the value of one of my Visa gift cards. I chose email fulfillment, figuring that I’d soon receive the necessary information by email to redeem my card and be done.

How can an e-product be “on backorder”?

When I received my order confirmation email from Buy.com, this is what I saw. Try to appreciate the moment of WTF I experienced as I tried to believe what I was reading. An emailed gift certificate was on back-order??! Are you kidding me? What, did they run out of electrons or bytes in the warehouse?

I tried to attribute this to some bug in their order confirmation email process, so I waited for an hour for a second email, which would never arrive, containing the gift certificate. Finally, I gave up and went back to Buy.com and cancelled my order.

Does Amazon.com do any better? I’m not sure. I just noticed this fine print on their gift certificate order page:

* Note: For security purposes, e-mail gift cards and printable gift cards may go under a 24-hour review process while payment information is verified.

I don’t know what to do, at this point. Have any of you been in this situation, trying to make a purchase using multiple credit cards? Should I just bite the bullet and purchase these Amazon.com gift certificates and wait 24 hours? Are there any better solutions? Please, help me out, leave me a comment with your best suggestions.

What happens when you give ultimate power and unlimited wealth to a black man? He invites all his homies to his crib and pops open the Cristal and throws a huge party, that’s what:

Obama’s inauguration set to be the most expensive in US history

President Barack Obama’s inauguration next week is set to be the most expensive ever, predicted to reach over $150m (£102m). This dwarfs the $42.3m spent on George Bush’s inauguration in 2005 and the $33m spent on Bill Clinton’s in 1993.

$150M dollars. Just let that sink in for a moment. That’s the salaries of roughly 3,500 jobs that pay $35k a year plus benefits, pissed away in 5 days.

Obama today issued a statement calling on people across the nation to participate by holding their own neighbourhood events, including their own balls. [...]

Did Obama just call on me to hold my own balls? We, the tax-paying public, don’t even get a reach-around?

Now I’ve heard enough.

Tags: United States, President, Obama, inauguration, funny

Can you believe this crap? I mean, look:

Prosecutors say Drew, 49, of O’Fallon, Missouri, helped create a false-identity MySpace account and harassed Meier with cruel messages.

Meier, who was being treated for depression, hanged herself after allegedly receiving messages saying the world would be better off without her.

So, some kid becomes an hero and they want to prosecute using the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act? That is absurd.

Sure, what Lori Drew did to Megan Meier–sending cruel messages–wasn’t nice. But, “not nice” in this case is in no way criminal! Otherwise, there’s crimes being committed every day in school yards, offices, customer service departments, etc., across the country. Seriously, where do we draw the line?

I’m sure it doesn’t need to be asked, but where were Megan’s parents in all of this?

I hope the trial jurors are smart enough to figure out how ridiculous this whole thing is. Case law really needs to be established here so no one else can get crucified like this.

Before you go flying into a rage in my comments section about how insensitive I am, or how I’ve got it all wrong … listen carefully: the world would be better off without you! Go hang yourself, now.

Tags: legal, MySpace, suicide

In May 2006, Scott Adams described what could be called the “Pragmatic Party” (sadly, his blog archives were nuked, but you can still read my entry). Last Tuesday, Barack Obama was elected President. Two days later, we have this website, change.gov:

Could Obama really be doing what Adams suggested? I was skeptical about Obama’s rallying cry for change, but this is incredibly hopeful looking.

Tags: politics, Barack Obama, Scott Adams, change

This is my BlackBerry Curve 8310 tethered to my MacBook Pro over Bluetooth:

Not the “high speed 3G EDGE” I was expecting. Is this really the height of technological achievement for 2008? Where’s my flying car? Jeez.

Tags: mobile, BlackBerry, Mac, Bluetooth, tethering