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Best Buy Sued

Best Buy Sued Over "Shower Cam"

By David WoodConsumerAffairs.Com
April 12, 2007

The Best Buy "Geek Squad" brochure says that only "agents you can trust" will be sent to repair your computer, but a lawsuit filed in Los Angeles County Superior Court alleges just the opposite.
The suit, filed by 22-year-old Sarah Vasquez and her mother, alleges that Geek Squad employee, 26-year-old Hao Kuo Chi, placed a cell phone camera in the bathroom for the purpose of videotaping Sarah and her younger sister.
According to the lawsuit, Chi placed the phone on the bathroom sink at an angle that would record anyone in the vicinity of the shower.
Vasquez used the bathroom to take a shower and once out of the shower, she saw the camera phone along with its blinking red light.

Feeling that something wasn't right, Vasquez walked out of the bathroom to tell her sister about the phone, and when Vasquez returned to the bathroom, the phone was gone.
The younger sister later found the phone in her bedroom, removed the memory chip, and that's when it all fell apart for Chi. The video images on the chip show Vasquez in the shower.
The suit alleges negligent hiring, fraud, invasion of privacy, among others.
Best Buy released the following statement: "Best Buy was not informed of this action prior to being contacted by the media today. Obviously, we intend to cooperate fully with any investigation into this matter."

(and previously)

Ohio Sues Best Buy

A lot of Ohio residents say the pledges and promises made by electronics super store Best Buy aren't worth the paper they're written on. Because of the hundreds of consumer complaints he's received about the giant retailer, the state's Attorney General, Jim Petro, is suing Best Buy, charging that it's engaged in a pattern of unfair and deceptive acts and practices. Petro says the primary objective of the lawsuit is "to bring Best Buy into conformity with Ohio's consumer protection laws and ensure that Best Buy's Ohio customers receive the service they deserve." The complaints filed by Ohio consumers claim -- among other things -- that Best Buy repackaged used goods and sold them as new, failed to honor rebates, failed to honor refund and exchange programs, and failed to honor extended service contracts. Additional Consumer Sales Practices Act violations charged in the lawsuit include: failure to honor implied warranties of merchantability, substandard and/or inadequate customer service, and making false and misleading statements to consumers. In the complaint, Petro is asking the court to prohibit Best Buy from engaging in practices that violate the Consumer Sales Practices Act, and to order the company to reimburse consumers who lost money or otherwise did not receive the full service they were promised. The complaint also asks that Best Buy pay a civil penalty of $25,000 for each violation of the Consumer Sales Practices Act.

Anti-aliasing

Anti-aliasing makes the edges of your type look nice and smooth instead of all jagged. Square pixels appear round because the color at the edge of your type is gradually changed to the color of the background, creating a more blended effect. This tricks your brain into thinking that the rounded and diagonal parts of letters aren't actually made of little squares, even though they are.

If you're working with large type, you'll definitely want to make sure "anti-aliased" is selected. But if you're setting small type - font sizes in the 6- to 9-point range (at 72 pixels per inch) - aliased type is usually easier to read than the anti-aliased type. But anything above 10 points looks better anti-aliased.

Photoshop Crash Course

"Photoshop Crash Course
Lesson 1
by Jim Frew

Photoshop Crash Course: "Page 1 — Photoshop Crash Course — Lesson 1"

Google Reader - Tour

"A quick tour of Google Reader"

Google Reader constantly checks your favorite news sites and blogs for new content. Whether a site updates daily or monthly, you can be sure that you won't miss a thing.


Check it out

Why and How DPI Matters When Printing

Digital Designer Toolbox » Blog Archive » Why and How DPI Matters When Printing:
"Sun16Jul '06
Why and How DPI Matters When Printing

Melissa's ideas about Designing Pages

Digital Prepress and inkjet printing are apples and oranges. The processes are completely different. A digital prepress is like a giant laser printer. The toner is a fine powder that is baked onto the paper. Ink jets use liquid ink that spreads when applied to paper because it’s liquid and thats what liquid does. As a result, ink jets print photo quality images with continuos tones as the ink spreads and overlaps. Files don’t need to be as large or contain as much information for a great ink jet print as they do for a great pre-press print. There is no visible quality increase over 150 dpi on an ink jet and in fact printing at higher quality may simply use more ink and cost more money."
More...

Picasa: Organize photos, instant albums, labels, stars, advanced picture search

Picasa: : "Organize
Picasa instantly locates and organizes all the pictures on your computer.
Find the pictures you forgot you had.
Picasa organizes your entire collection while you watch, scanning the images on your computer and automatically sorting them by date."


More on Picasa: Organize photos, instant albums, labels, stars, advanced picture search:

Flower Garden

This one is just for fun -- click on the title and enjoy yourself. Try holding the mouse down or try individual clicks. Hit refresh on the browser to start over.

Crowdsourcing

Randy Burge: Internet allows us to resource the crowd
By Randy BurgeMonday, April 9, 2007
To learn more about the phenomenon of "crowdsourcing," visit crowdsourcing.typepad.com.

Crowdsourcing is one of those heady new words, a neologism coined from two other words, to describe global work-related phenomena unleashed by Internet connectivity.
Crowdsourcing is a new business model taking the concept of work, workers and business beyond the more familiar work force stretches of telecommuting, outsourcing and open-sourcing, to ever-expanding virtual realms with great opportunities and perils for business or careers.

In crowdsourcing, a job no longer equals the output of one person, nor the work of a group, nor even the company in some examples. Rather, the tasks normally assigned to one person, work group or company are opened up via the Internet to be completed or resolved by an undefined number of people who may either work for pay or who contribute as volunteers.


More on crowd sourcing

PC Cleanup Pays Off in Performance

From AARP

"Some experts believe that, in addition to physically cleaning your computer (which many people pay to have done), PC operating systems, hard drives, applications, and data files should occasionally be scrubbed to improve PC performance, reliability, and system life."
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101 Fantastic Freebies

Page1 - MSN Tech & Gadgets - Downloads: "101 Fantastic Freebies
By Preston Gralla, PC World
Want to make your PC more productive, secure, informative, and entertaining? These downloads and services will do the trick--and they don't cost a dime.
Once upon a time you actually had to pay for great software and services -- hard to believe, but true.

Luckily, we no longer live in that world. The Internet is stuffed with great downloads and Web sites offering free software and services of every kind. Want to tune up your PC, keep it safe, create graphics, or back up your system with gobs of free storage space? You can find free software and sites to do all that, and plenty more.
We revved up our cable modem and searched for the most intriguing free offerings out there. After we took each download or service for a test-drive, we picked the very best, and came up with the following list of 101 great freebies.
We didn't do it alone, though -- you helped. We polled PC World readers, asking for your top freebies in several categories, so here you'll find your favorites as well as ours. "

More Fantastic Freebies ... :