Jiffy Lube caught again!

Back in North Carolina I was suspicious about my local Jiffy Lube not doing work they claimed, so I started to watch them and made a list of work they did vs. work they claimed they did and I identified significant discrepencies. I called and complained and corporate headquarters refunded my money. This time, a TV crew caught them in 5 out of 9 repairs not doing the work they stated. This is not a new problem with Jiffy Lube. At Oil Can Henry's I can watch them on a TV screen so that is where I now go for oil changes. I recommend using Oil Can Henry's, and Jiffy Lube needs to adopt this strategy as well. Its impossible for corporate to police everyone, so empower consumers to watch for themselves.

Grand Theft Auto Like Coke commercial...

Kim posted here a nifty ad that Coke has done that looks like a scene from the game Grand Theft Auto. I haven't watched a commercial in awhile, let alone watched it twice. Good work to the Coke advertising dept.

Microsoft Share Buyback stupidity....

Okay, so i get this letter the other day, its like 60 pages long and says the following:

"Microsoft would like to buy your Microsoft shares from you for a price between ~24 and 25 and some change". We can't tell you which of the numbers in between those two numbers we will buy it for, we can only say it will be somewhere in between these two values.

Would you like to sell your shares for that price?

Can I ask what the value is in this escapade? If I wanted to sell my shares why wouldn't I just log onto my account and click 'sell'. best of all, if i wanted to sell at less than market value, which is what the letter was asking, I would just sell at a lower value.

How much did it cost to send every shareholder of MS (or 'lots of shareholders') this letter? I just don't get it.

If the letter said:

Hey, we want your shares and we know you don't want to sell them, but what if we give you 10% more than they are trading for on such and such a date" maybe that i would have responded to.

Maybe I'm just missing something here, but the only thing it proved is that alot of us have no desire to get rid of our shares of the company, but that is already reflected in the stock price.

confused,

--adam

Newport News and Matthews County, VA

After spending some the week in Boston I caught a flight down to Newport News to spend some time with Stacey, her family, and friends of the family. Met her grandmother for the first time and caught up with her parents. We spent the weekend in Matthew’s County and did some serious kayaking both evenings around sunset in the local rivers (no whitewater, sorry Stephen and Charles :). Good times, went by so fast though. Also got to explore some of the coffee shops in the Newport News and Williamsburg area. I learned that wireless access isn’t as prevelant in other parts of country as the Pacific Northwest. Hoping this all changes as WiMax rolls out. I hadn’t seen Stacey for about 4 weeks, so I was glad she remembered who I was when we me at the airport :)

The Great City of Boston and SIGGRAPH 2006

Headed up to Boston the first week of August for SIGGRAPH. My hotel was about 30 minutes from the convention center by bus so I got to see quite a bit of the city. I also got a chance to catch up with some good friends from graduate school who were spending time visiting in the north end of Boston called Little Italy. My reaction to Boston: I LOVED IT!! truly a great, beautiful city, people seemed very genuine and I can understand why people like it there so much. The biggest surprise to me was it didn’t have this ‘huge mega-city’ feel I expected. Instead, forgetting for a moment about a heatwave, it was a very walkable city with great food and great people.