as we wait for midnight to approach and for that jolly old fat man to fly south and give us our presents, i am trying to think of a past christmas when there was as much stress about the future and money as this year. i don’t want anyone to have a hard time or a troublesome holiday, but it is my hope that this year, things will be different and people won’t focus as much on materialistic things. it probably won’t last, because as soon as the fear of economic peril is gone, people will be back to buying the biggest and best gifts.

i’m happy to have my fiancée and my dog. wrap them up and let me open them, because they are the greatest gifts that always keep on giving. and i’m happy for my friends and family. they may be far away, but they are always in my heart.

merry christmas!

we’ve been on a netflix hiatus due to lack of cash and not being able to get new releases in a timely manner. i still love netflix, but it was time for a break.

recently, i decided to give this redbox rental service a try. they have redbox kiosks in various stores around town. you pick your dvd, swipe your credit card and the dvd pops out. it’s only $1 per night.

i like this setup, because it’s like blockbuster without the idiot workers. it’s simple, inexpensive, and convenient. plus, i found some promo codes online to get a free day rental ($1 value).

another cool thing is how you can reserve a movie on their website and pick it up at the kiosk.

it’s a movie vending machine!

i really don’t want people to lose their jobs or the economy to erode further into nothingness. however, i think corporate welfare is not the answer. the big three u.s. auto manufacturers had every chance in the world to make themselves profitable. in the world of business, you either sink or swim, but you don’t get a life preserver handed to you after you shackled weights to your ankles.

i can’t remember where i read it, but someone said that the best resolution to this scenario would be to give the bailout money to toyota or honda and have them buy out all three of the u.s. companies and then either manufacture their own cars or restructure the companies so they are profitable again. i thought that was probably the best idea ever.

the ceos of these three auto makers say that the rough turn in the economy is why they need the bailout money. great, except that everyone is hurting, and these three companies have been headed toward ruin for a long time now. it wasn’t an overnight economic meltdown that caused this. and no matter how you want to look at things, no amount of money is going to get people buying the amount of new cars they need to be bought. i don’t think these gigantic corporations will be able to stay afloat at all in these dismal times. bailout or not.

i just love these congressional hearings where the fat cat ceos are begging for money. they are like homeless people at a street corner, only they fly in private jets or drive hybrids.

these are interesting times for businesses. we get to see just how bulletproof they really aren’t.

some fridays are blacker than others. last friday, i worked and luckily didn’t get trampled by any angry mobs.

i read this article at work yesterday and really enjoyed its eloquence.

i’ve been thinking about this incident all week and wanted to blog about it. i think the above article says it best.

i will say that this is one of the reasons i don’t shop at wal-mart at all. i never had faith in humanity, but i have even less faith in wal-mart shoppers. to think that someone died and these shoppers didn’t want to be inconvenienced by leaving the store since they stood outside all night is just beyond fathomable. if there is a hell (besides the one i live in), it has a special place for those shoppers. and in that place, their heads will be crushed daily by the feet of frothy-mouthed consumers looking for a deal on underwear.

a while back, dr pepper said they’d give everyone in america a free dr pepper if guns n’ roses released “chinese democracy” by the end of the year.

the album came out yesterday, and dr pepper said they’d issue coupons to everyone who signed up for them on their site yesterday. only problem is that the site was decimated by hordes of people wanting free soda.

so they extended the offer to 6pm today. and their site is still beyond toast.

how do you offer something free like this and not be ready for it? easy, it’s all part of the plan. if i were a company, i would offer free stuff and then make it impossible to obtain said free items. in fact, it’s what we are already accustomed to. when companies do contests and promotions, it is a sham. they’re not going to give you anything that is worth anything. they are doing it to make you buy their products.

this thing has been a joke from the beginning. this is how it works: you register on the dr pepper site (assuming you’re somehow able to penetrate their ailing server), and they mail you a coupon in 4-6 weeks that has to be used by february 28. so you have a registration process that doesn’t work thanks to technological inadequacies, you have a delivery system (postal service) that is not always the most reliable, and you have a very small window of redemption.

if they weren’t total douches, they would have upgraded their server and made the coupon printable. they would have saved the postage. oh, but they wouldn’t have saved postage because they are only going to be sending 5 of these coupons to the people who logged on at 5 am.