Day: December 27, 2005

Thank you, Fry’s ad!

Fry’s had a couple of DVDs that we wanted in their “one day sale” ad in today’s Murky Nooz: Serenity and Battlestar Galactica Season 2.0. (“We” is defined as “at least Jeff”, by the way.) But, after my recent experience, I didn’t want to go to Fry’s if I could possibly avoid it (by the way, I still haven’t gotten a response to the letter I sent Randy Fry).

Instead, I went to Circuit City to test their price matching policy.

The first cashier I dealt with was at a temporary register, and he said he couldn’t do a price match, but he sent me to one of his colleagues at a permanent register. He couldn’t help me either, and sent me to the returns/exchanges/customer service line. We were first in line. It still took several minutes for someone to help us, and I had to show him the price on both items in the Fry’s ad, but there was no problem in meeting it — in fact, he didn’t even bother to phone Fry’s to make sure they still had the DVDs in stock.

But then I threw a wrench into the proceedings; there was a coupon on the DVDs, good for $10 if you bought both Serenity and BSG 2.0 together. He wasn’t sure if he could honor the coupon and do a price match, so he vanished into the back room for a few minutes. Then he came out and rang up the lowered price (in fact, now that I think of it, he saved us an extra 8 cents by reducing the price of BSG by $10 instead of entering a $10 coupon).

I can’t call this a “no-hassle” experience, but it was enormously easier than getting a price match at Fry’s was. I intend to continue to avoid Fry’s whenever I expect to be able to pick up the same merchandise elsewhere.

Don’t omit the commit

I’m slowly making progress at converting my old blog from Manila to WordPress; it looks like the simplest approach is to write a bunch of Python scripts to read the “content-only” version of the blog, resolve intra-blog references, and then directly insert the result into the underlying MySQL database using MySQLdb.

In testing this approach, I was trying to create a posting from scratch in a copy of WordPress running on my machine; I based the program on the examples I found here and here. But, even though the program seemed to work, and I could read the changes while the program was executing, but after the program finished, the database never reflected the changes — except that the ID for new entries kept increasing every time I ran the program.

It took me a long time to figure out what was wrong, but I eventually guessed it: I had to do an explicit “COMMIT” to have the changes I made from Python stick. I don’t know why the examples don’t show this, but it sure makes a difference.

More to come, I hope.