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.

Rather broad, but generally satisfactory

We just got home from San Jose Rep‘s production of Pride and Prejudice. I thought it could have been tightened up some (the play ran 2:40 with intermission, which is pretty long for an 8pm show), and they played it more for laughs than I thought the book called for, but in general, I enjoyed the show. I wouldn’t mind seeing the movie (either the current movie or the classic BBC production) to compare.

Pre-burning calories

We used to go to the movies on Christmas Day — we’d have the place nearly to ourselves, and it was wonderful. Maybe not for the theater owners, but we liked it. But over time, more and more people decided that Christmas was a good day for the movies, and the theaters became fairly crowded. And then Hollywood caught on and started releasing movies on Christmas, and we stopped going.

Today, we took advantage of the JCC being open on Christmas (at least in the morning). I think this was the most crowded I’d ever seen the exercise room. But we were able to get our workouts in, and now we’re ready to consume vast quantities of calories this evening.