June 26, 2007
The asshat “administrative law judge” who sued a local Dry Cleaners has had his case for $54 million over a lost pair of pants tossed. This genius originally wanted to suck $67 million from the owners of Custom Cleaners, though later dropped the number to $54 million, all merely because he claimed that the dry cleaners lost his favorite pair of his suit trousers. When the dry cleaners found his missing pants and offered to return them to Pearson, the asshat-cum-administrative-judge claimed that the pants were not his.
Fortunately for the Chung family, owners of the dry cleaner in question, clearer heads prevailed. Superior Court Judge Judith Bartnoff ruled that Custom Cleaners did not violate the city’s Consumer Protection Act by failing to live up to Pearson’s expectations of the “Satisfaction Guaranteed” sign displayed in the store window. Pearson, the plaintiff in the case, who also happens to be an administrative law judge (whatever the fuck that means), claimed that the “Satisfaction Guaranteed” sign was an unconditional warranty that required the defendants to honor any claim by any customer without limitation. Yes, this unreasonable asshat somehow became a judge of sorts and is given the power to pass judgment on others.
How did asshat Pearson arrive at the $54 million dollar figure you ask? He calculated the damages by estimating years of violations, then adding almost $2 million in common-law claims for fraud.
Pearson represented himself during a two-day trial earlier this month and claimed millions of dollars in attorney fees and millions more in punitive damages for what he claimed was fraudulent advertising.
Pearson said that when he took the pants to Custom Cleaners, his financial situation was ruinous. He had just been ordered to pay $12,000 in attorney’s fees to his ex-wife and his credit cards were at their limit.
The Chungs’ attorney argued that no reasonable person would interpret the sign to mean an unconditional promise of satisfaction, and Bartnoff agreed.
In a 23-page finding of fact, Bartnoff wrote: “A reasonable consumer would not interpret ‘Satisfaction Guaranteed’ to mean that a merchant is required to satisfy a customer’s unreasonable demands or accede to demands that the merchant has reasonable grounds to dispute.”
Pearson had “not met his burden of proving that the pants the defendants attempted to return to him were not the pants he brought in for alteration,” the judge concluded.
Luckily, Judge Bartnoff awarded court costs to the Chungs. These people have had to spend tens of thousands of dollars defending their good name. They are now in the processing of trying to have their attorney’s fees paid by Pearson. I would have hoped to see this case dismissed with prejudice so that this asshat would not be able to bring future frivolous lawsuits of this nature upon the Chungs.
I with the Chungs the best of luck in their future endeavors. Hopefully, though doubtfully, Pearson will think twice about making a public spectacle of his supreme asshatness.
June 25, 2007
I have been playing around with a little home-grown web based application in my extremely spare but damn near non-existent free time. I wrote a simple PHP shell script that pulls data from a variety of data brokers via curl. The data that is brokered is mostly in standard RSS and ATOM formats, but is not limited to such a format. In fact, the format that the data is received in is really irrelevant.
Once the data is completely downloaded it is then parsed in a number of ways. Upon successful completion of the parsing portions of the resulting data are stored in a MySQL database. In 80% of the cases, this is not an issue at all. The remaining 20% are resulting in errors that I just can not seem to fix. Colour me the stupid programmer I guess.
The “problem,” if there is one, is that the brokered data is in UTF-8 format, mainly because of the possibility of foreign characters. As I said, in most cases this is not an issue at all. But I continue to experience issues, specifically with the last.fm recent tracks RSS feed.
As with most of the data I am parsing, the feed is in UTF-8 format. I can properly parse the feed up until the point where I am about to insert the data in to a MySQL table with the “INSERT INTO” command. In fact, a simple echoing of the data on the single line preceding the SQL query shows that the data is in the right format. Here is an example:
--> TITLE..: Beastie Boys - Oh Word?
----> GUID.: http://www.last.fm/user/jark/#1182746337
----> URL..: http://www.last.fm/music/Beastie Boys/_/Oh Word?
----> DATE.: 2007-06-25 13:38:57
--> INSERT INTO life_items (stream_id, item_name, item_link, item_guid, item_datetime) VALUES ('6', 'Beastie Boys - Oh Word?', 'http://www.last.fm/music/Beastie Boys/_/Oh Word?', 'http://www.last.fm/user/jark/#1182746337', '2007-06-25 13:38:57')
As can be plainly seen, the “TITLE” data, and even the actual query itself, appear valid and without any odd characters or strange UTF-8 encoded sequences. The problem is that when the data is added in the MySQL the “TITLE” is truncated right after the dash character (-) every time. Here is an example row:
5452 | 6 | Beastie Boys - | http://www.last.fm/music/Beastie Boys/_/Oh Word? | http://www.last.fm/user/jark/#1182746337 | 2007-06-25 13:38:57
No matter what I try I can not seem to fix this problem. Oddly enough this problem began to surface after I migrated the script, and the domain, over to our recently acquired Joyent accelerator. Everything functioned without issue on DreamHost, though I make no assumptions about anything.
I have ensured that all the character encoding variables in MySQL are set to UTF-8. PHP has been set-up so that the default character-encoding is UTF-8. I even run the following MySQL query directly after connecting to MySQL, hopefully ensuring that the character set used is UTF-8:
$lsdb->query("SET NAMES 'utf8'");
$lsdb->query("SET CHARACTER SET 'utf8'");
This is the oddest part of it all. If I perform the same INSERT from above using the MySQL command-line client, or even through phpMyAdmin, the data gets entered in to the database successfully. Additionally, other data that is parsed from a variety of brokers, and in the same UTF-8 format and with identical data, is also entered in to the database successfully.
So with all that said, anyone out there have any clues as to what I should look for? Anyone willing and able to help me solve this devastatingly painstaking problem? Pretty please? I will love you forever and ever and ever!
June 21, 2007
OJ Simpson’s book “If I Did It,” a supposed fictional account of the night that his wife was murdered, has apparently been leaked online. Nobody seems to be speaking about the authenticity. Should make for an interesting read for those interested. (via)
6 Comments
June 16, 2007
I sure was interested to read that deviantART completed a Series A round of funding. It would appear that the company opted not to be backed by an actual VC-firm but instead by DivX Inc, the company behind the highly popular Divx codec.
Online art and photo-sharing community deviantART has raised $3.5 million in its first round of financing, PEHub.com reported, citing a regulatory filing.
The company’s shareholders include video compression developer DivX, Inc.
Launched in 2000, Hollywood-based deviantART allows artists, photographers and writers to upload and exhibit their works online, create artist pages, and network with the community.
As of May, the site claimed 37 million submissions and attracted over 4.5 million unique monthly users.
This move is interesting for a few reasons. First and foremost, the young CEO of deviantART, Angelo Sotira, can no longer claim that he has not sold his soul to the devil by taking capital in order to build the company. This is a point that Sotira prides himself on and will surely argue if pressed, most likely claiming that since the financing came from DivX Inc as opposed to a Venture Capital firm that such funding is okay.
Additionally, the mere fact that deviantART opted to take funding from a full-motion-video company is an interesting maneuver. I find it intriguing mainly because deviantART leadership has had a strong desire to get in to the video business in some capacity, possibly in an attempt to use their “expertise” in the art community realm to try and make a splash in the video community arena. This means competing against the 100 pound gorilla, YouTube, who is owned by Google as well as on the heels of Flickr adding the ability to submit video based content as well.
What transpires from here on out ought to be interesting. In the highly challenging game of online community business-chess, the crossroads that deviantART currently finds itself at is quite precarious. Will their moves prove to be disastrous or otherwise?
deviantART used to be at the technological forefront of the online community space but has seen feature and functionality stagnation over the course of the past 3-4 years. No killer feature has been introduced to the community lately, which is completely opposite of the culture that the site was founded upon. Though this is true, the user based seemingly grows exponentially and I imagine the revenue along with it.
Good looking out Vince for this good, yet hidden, small bit of information.
June 3, 2007
If you are seeing this then that means that you are viewing the site from it’s new home or that your RSS aggregator is grabbing the updated feed. That is a good thing. Much of what I wanted to accomplish has been completed although there appears to be some lingering after-effects. In the coming days I plan to do some major work around the site so truly be aware of complications that may arise as a result.
Sure does feel nice to have the site at it’s new home. Thanks to the good folks at Joyent for their excellent service!
