Thursday, July 25, 2013

Why I hate Winn Dixie!

I've been meaning to post this for sometime now, and even now I have only a few minutes, but I wanted to rant for a moment. One thing I want to make clear is that I'm not talking about employees, I'm talking about a corporation here. The employees have always tried to be kind and accomadating.

I just want that understood.

So now, I have a question for the world out there: why does Winn Dixie refuse to appreciate their customers? I have evidence proving that they don't. No. Really.

The most recent insult has been the removal of the self-checkout lanes. WTF?! As my son put it, "I guess Winn Dixie said, 'How can we make it more difficult to shop so we can better compete with Walmart? I know! Let's remove the only thing that keeps customers coming back! Let's take out the self-checkouts!'"

How stupid do you have to be to come to a decision like that?

If you've read any of my posts, you'll be aware that I'm a staunch conservative. That also means that I am completely against frivolous lawsuits. Liberals are idiots because they don't seem to understand that this doesn't mean we support corporations railroading people. We believe in fairness.

My mother was once in a Winn Dixie store in Atlanta. An empty chunk of metal was sticking out of their shelf and tore into my mother's eye. All my mother wanted was for her emergency room bill to be paid. Guess who refused to pay up? You guessed it!

My daughter was once in a Winn Dixie store just outside of Mobile, Alabama. There were two idiot teens (one was over 18)  riding around on one of those handicap scooters. The morons were calling great attention to themselves. Apparently one of them was a former Winn Dixie employee. He had actually been fired from Winn Dixie the very day before this incident.

Let me veer off for a moment and ask the first question here. Why was he allowed to enter the store after he'd been fired? Disgruntled employees anyone? That's the first mistake Winn Dixie made.

My daughter paid for her groceries and went out to her car. Those boys pulled up beside her and mugged her.

Clearly, the boys lacked intelligence. You don't pull a mugging just after everyone saw you (on video cameras too) clowning around inside a store that you were fired from! I mean come on! They definitely deserved the stupid criminal of the month award.

In any case, police easily obtained their identities and my daughter picked them out of a line up and that, as they say, was that.

What bothers me about it is the situation. The Winn Dixie manager was very apologetic. He felt terrible and he took my daughter's name and number and promised her that the Winn Dixie corporation would be contacting her with something special like a free gift or free merchandise.

Ask me what she got. Go ahead, ask.

She got nothing. NOTHING! Not even an apology from the corporation. Winn Dixie didn't give a rats ass. We could have sued the pants off of them! Our kindness in NOT suing them was rewarded by them through absolutely no concern for her welfare, in the least?

NOTE TO WINN DIXIE: You suck and are the most miserable store I've ever seen. You're worse than Walmart and since I see that there are few who actually shop there, I hope you go out of business.

I'll be there with champagne (bought at your biggest competitor) to toast your going out of business sale right there in front of everyone.

Unlike Winn Dixie, I'll keep my word.

Monday, July 15, 2013

I need a good RSS reader!

I'm heart broken that Google Reader is no more. I loved that RSS reader. I mean, I wanted to marry it and everything. It was perfect and worked so simply. I have been so upset that I shied away from anything RSS since. Now, after being in mourning and weeping near constantly, I'm finally feeling the desire to begin dating another RSS again. After playing around with a few, I realized that I actually had a few needs that must be met. They're not many, but they are required.
  • It must be available in the cloud so I can access it from my pc, my Galaxy phone and my Kindle Fire. This also means that it requires an Android app for my Galaxy and my Fire.
  • I need to be able to rename Feeds. For example, Fox News has a boat load of individual feeds. However when I add certain feeds, it is automatically named "Fox News". NOT HELPFUL! When I want to only read the "Digging History" feed then I have to click through all the feeds named "Fox News" until I finally figure it out. Screw that! I want to just be able to rename the stupid feeds so I will right away know what the frick it is.
  • I need to be able to organize feeds into folders.
That's not a lot to ask, is it? Then why is so freaking hard to find what I need?! My first attempt was the popular Feedly, the one with glowing reviews. Feedly met all the criteria. It has apps, it lets me rename them and it organizes things into folders. Great. So I give it a spin. The problem is that I cannot keep that account separate. That is, I must link it to another account. I'm now not even sure what account I linked it to originally. There is nothing anywhere that says what account it's attached to, so when I go to log in on my phone or my KF, it says "sorry, there is no record of that account." REALLY?! Why can't I have a simple Feedly account and be done with it?!

The next one I tried is Pulse. Visually Pulse is stunning but that's about where all the love ends. Since I cannot rename feeds, Pulse is automatically disqualified. I cannot for the life of me understand why this is so. It is obvious that they have put a lot of time and effort into it's visual appeal, but to glaringly ignore the most important function speaks volumes to me. Sorry, but Pulse is then trash in my opinion.

Another one I found was gReader. My little three requirements seemed like peanuts compared to its rich list of features. Well, that was until I realized that you can't freaking view it on your pc. Seriously?! You can't freaking view it on your pc?! I couldn't believe it. WTF? That would be my dream app, but too bad it sucks for not being viewable online.

Now RssDemon is another app that initially sounds heavenly, like gReader. The problem though is the same with gReader. There is no pc support. Additionally, it looks as though the app has been abandoned. The last post at its website is way back from February 2012 and it's last app update was also February 2012. No thanks.

NewsRob is also finished, so there is no point in even discussing it.

There really are no further apps worth mentioning. The rest have basically the same features.

It's really too bad that there isn't a perfect one out there. I'm just saddened by the fact that gReader limits itself to an app only utility.

I guess for now I'm stuck with the very basic and archaic Feedly... unless some of you out there have better suggestions.

Monday, July 08, 2013

Murder and television.

I have to admit something. It's hard to admit and there is probably a support group out there for someone like me, but I have a problem that always comes back to haunt me. It's called: crime shows.

My first adult book that I ever read was The Godfather, I kid you not. My favorite movie (because I was too young to actually watch The Godfather and besides, we didn't have DVDs back then) was Death on the Nile, an Agatha Christie film (with a stellar cast, I might add). The first murder trial that I followed, praying she would be put away, was the trial of sociopathic, and truly bent (not to mention, unattractive), Diane Downs.

As far as I can remember, I've been intrigued with murder, whether fiction or non. I loved Unsolved Mysteries and America's Most Wanted, when they first aired. I still remember watching the very first Unsolved Mysteries episode, that was hosted by Raymond Burr.

Later in life, there was Forensic Files and City Confidential. Now there is an entire network (actually there are a couple) that are dedicated to crime, but the shows have gotten a bit sleazy.

Despite the sleaze, I have my current favorites. One is Scorned, Love Kills. Besides the obvious (meaning stories), what I really like about that one is Nicole Blackman, the narrator. I love her voice, her tone and her rhythm when she reads the story, and how she enunciates.

In fact, I liked her voice so much I Googled her. Well that was a let down. I won't say why, but I'll just say it was.

The other one I like, and this is a not to be missed show, is Homicide Hunter. Now I must confess that I avoided that one like the plague. I don't know why, but I thought it was more like Dog: The Bounty Hunter (the older one) or something.

I could just kick myself for that! A couple of weeks ago I turned on the TV and his show was on. He was on the screen talking about a case. I didn't know what the show was, but I was absolutely mesmerized by him. Instantly I was intrigued and there were several episodes of his on that day.

I never moved from the couch, I kid you not. That man is absolutely amazing! How can anyone describe him? There are simply no words! He is a kind and understanding man, but at the same time he is strong, tough and a seriously alpha male. He's the one you want investigating murders but not the one you want to come after you.

Now, I've watched a lot of shows in my time. I've seen all kinds of garbage, people trying to act like a normal Joe when they're arrogant and so forth. You know who I mean, those cheesy and sleazy folks out there. Most just want their names in the papers or on TV, right?

Well Lt. Kenda is NOT one of those people, I don't think. He appears to be completely genuine to me. His empathy is just very touching. I believe him to be a man with real integrity. You don't find many of those and you definitely don't see it in politicians (all together now: Obama anyone?).

Anyway all of this was to say that if you haven't seen his show, stop what you're doing right now and head on over to either Amazon or Netflix and watch it. Let me know what you think! I hope you love him as I do.