Today, I stopped by the local Staples, which is going out of business, to pick up a bunch of miscellaneous supplies (labels, Rolodex cards, and the like). They happened to have a pile of Tensor booklights, too, and I needed one, so I bought it. When I got home, I found that the light didn’t work; foolishly, I thought that they might make an exception to “All Sales Final” for merchandise that was instantly defective.

So I went back to the store and asked the cashier, who called the manager, who told me that “Staples doesn’t own the merchandise in the store any more, the liquidator does, and they say no returns”, and went on to say that I should have tested the booklight before buying it (which would have required opening the blister pack and having had the foresight to have brought batteries along).

I could have tolerated being told “no refunds”. But I was angered by the manager’s “blame the customer” attitude, hence this posting (and the letter I’ve just mailed to Staples’ CEO), and my plan to avoid Staples from now on.

One of the reasons I wanted to be running Windows XP on my laptop was the hope that I could use its ability to support two displays at once. It doesn’t matter how big a screen is, I always wind up covering it with a single application — but with two screens, I thought I might be able to have two applications visible at once and even do cut-and-paste between them.

So I got a port replicator and set things up yesterday, only to find that it was a disaster. Having two displays was nice, but when they’re wildly different in size and placed fairly far away from one another, I found it very difficult to cope. It didn’t help that Windows doesn’t notice when one undocks, and so applications still tried to use the screen that wasn’t there.

So I gave up on that idea. Today’s attempt, which seems to be a bit more successful so far, is to use two screens on my desktop machine here at work. The screens are nearly the same size and are close enough togther that the mouse does seem to move almost seamlessly between them, but I can sure tell that one of the displays is a significantly older model, with a curved screen (instead of the flat CRT of my newer display). What I’d like is two modern LCD screens, but I can’t really justify the upgrade yet.

(Update: I swapped my old curved CRT for a newer, flat-screen CRT, so now I have two CRTs with the same characteristics. That’s much better!)

Thanks, Brent!

Brent Simmons is leaving Userland today. Thanks, Brent, for all the hard work on Manila, Frontier, and especially keeping the ETP servers up and running.

Thanks, Sam!

Sam Palmisano took over as CEO of IBM today, and the stock went up $4.90. Now, if he can just keep that happening for fifty more days, I’d be a very happy camper.

Shabbat Shalom!