Oct 01 2012

Never order from TurboJunky.com

Tag: Cars,General,Grrr,really..?!Paul C. @ 11:59 am

I ordered a T-shirt from TurboJunky on August 23rd of this year during my lunch break. I should have googled the company first because there are a number of bad reviews for them. Anyway according to the FAQ on their website:

How long will it take for my order to ship?
Once an order has been placed your order will be processed and shipped within 1-3 business days.
How long does it take for my order to arrive?
Domestic orders are shipped via USPS Priority Mail (2-5 business days). International shipments via USPS Express mail or FedEx and usually take about 3-10 business days.
*(Weather conditions, holidays, or incorrect shipping information can delay shipments)

A few minutes after I received the payment confirmation email, I received an order confirmation for this shirt:

$4.99 plus $4.00 shipping. On August 31st, I hadn’t received any update to my order so I filled out the form on their website asking for an update. For some reason my account on their site isn’t working so I was unable to login there and view the details. Maybe I didn’t create an account. I’m not 100% sure on that. Never heard back.

On September 5th, I shot an email to moe@turbojunky.com and executive187@gmail.com (the email address I received a form confirmation from). Never heard back.

On September 10th, I posted to their Facebook page asking where my order was. I also sent a private message via Facebook to Moe Lufti who is listed as the owner-operator. TurboJunky posted a reply to my Wall post that it “will arrive shortly i am very sorry for the delay we are extremely backed up”. I replied asking for a tracking number and to define shortly. Never heard back.

One September 17th, I received an email notification that my item shipped. Thank God. His operation runs out of California so shipping via first class USPS or UPS ground should take 5 to 7 business days. Today is October 1st and it is exactly two weeks since the shipped notice. Nothing. I replied to the shipped notice this morning (sending to both the gmail and turbo junky account) and re-posted to my comment on the TruboJunky.com Facebook wall. I’ll bet I don’t hear back from them.

I should have paid with a credit card instead of a debit card, but in all my internet transactions, I honestly can’t recall a bad experience that didn’t eventually get resolved. If you google “turbojunky.com scam” there are currently 967 results and “turbojunky.com order problems” results in 3,630 results. I read through a number of forum posts where people either didn’t get their order, only got part of their order, or the order was wrong. Not only that, but the Better Business Bureau rates them as an “F”.

Isn’t this the stuff law suits are made for? I think I may spend a couple nights looking into that. Or talking to my father-in-law (he’s a lawyer). May contact the local sheriff as well. I did have one experience back in 2001 or 2002 where a guy took some money for aftermarket car parts in a “group buy” and we got him arrested. That was for more than an $5 tshirt though.


May 27 2009

Ever had a bad family photo?

Tag: Fun,Fun Links and Stuff,General,really..?!Paul C. @ 9:48 am

Family portraits rarely turn out perfect, and if they don’t – and you have them online somewhere – the may end up here:
http://awkwardfamilyphotos.com
There are some REALLY bad ones on here. Some are just kind of bad, but you know these guys regret this photo today:


Oct 14 2008

Webserver Problems….grin and bear it. (warning: geek content)

Tag: Computers and Electronics,Friends,really..?!Paul C. @ 3:20 pm

So on the 11th, I received an email from our hosting company, BlueHost.com, that the server would be undergoing maintenance to improve performance all around.

The server paulandemily.com is hosted on will be undergoing a hardware upgrade at approximately

10PM MST October 11th

We expect the downtime for the account to be 1-2 hours, but could becompleted long before that window. This upgrade will greatly increase performance on your server and therefor your account. We apologizefor any inconvenience.
BlueHost Support

Unfortunately that 1 to 2 hour window is now up to 6 days. I chatted with a bluehost.com live rep from their website (after having one completely ignore and the chat die from inactivity…thanks). He said that the admins invested $32,000 into memory for this server and they are merging two physical servers into one. Maybe they should have invested in CPUs instead of memory because I keep hitting a CPU bottleneck. I guess their upgrade did not go smoothly and the expiration for the migration has now been changed to:
Expires: Fri Oct 17 07:20:13 2008
I know a few of my blog readers have their websites hosted on my account so I wanted to give a heads up. You can track the maintenance a bit by going here:
http://serverstatus.bluehost.com/ (edit: added thanks to Sean)
type your domain into the box and click submit. Right now its telling me:
Server Load:
* 2008-10-14 13:05:31: Box under heavy load — you may experience degraded system performance
Services:
* 2008-10-14 13:05:31: box56 and box57 merged into this server to provide better services for our customers
The CPU load on the server is really high. This server has 8 CPUs (or 8 cores..can’t really tell) and its got a CPU load of 18.02, so that means that the server’s CPUs are over loaded. 18.02 load/8 cores = 2.2525 load average per core. That means that when the processor was working on one process, there was 1.25 other processes waiting to be executed. Think of it as going to your favorite grocery store and they have 8 checkout lanes open and 18 people waiting to purchase their goods. The processes are the shopping carts and the contents of the carts vary so some take longer than others to check out.

Anyway, if you get an error about the site hogging CPU time or something about it being suspended, bear with me and refresh a few minutes later. Same goes for AshandBrian.com, GSGates.net, KurtandJodie.com, AJAllen.net, 92Turbo.com, Go2Fast.net, LaryandNarni.com, HearnHappenings.com, MatthewandAmberly.com, and a couple other sites I host. TTFN


Sep 22 2008

Why?

Tag: really..?!,WorkPaul C. @ 12:40 pm

< rant >
Why do people waste my time with a phone call when we have a nice instant messaging package for use in our office? I get so many phone calls that are simple one answer, close ended questions, when the person could quite simply double click my name, ask the questions, and receive an answer. Its mostly people who don’t work in our local office, so they waste long distance time too!
< /rant >


Sep 16 2008

Gotta love working in the schools…

Tag: General,really..?!Emily @ 5:04 pm

Working for the school system is paying off bigtime in the past few days. I guess Campbell County got hit really bad (plus, most of it is rural) and they are still having major power problems. I was off school Monday and Today, and just got a call that we are off tomorrow too. Sound like it’s a possibility that we’ll be off all week. SWEET! Had I been working for NorthKey, I’d have been at work Monday, wet hair and all (no blow dryers without power!). It would have been hell, seeing that I can’t wash clothes, dry my hair, iron clothes, etc etc etc.

I took Sean to daycare today (since I paid for the week anyway) and got a lot done around the house. Finished raking the sticks and branches out of the front yard; filled my 5th garbage can today with sticks just from the front yard. That should give you some idea about the amount of damage we’re seeing around here. I haven’t even ventured into the backyard yet, which has 3-5 12+ foot branches in it, with countless little branches and sticks. Guess we’ll have to wait until trash pickup again so we have empty trash cans to put them in. What a mess!

Got the fridge cleaned out today. LUCKILY we put off shopping for some reason this weekend, so we only had bare minimum food anyway. Just some milk, eggs, yogurt and cheese. We had 3-4 things of meat in the freezer along with 4-5 frozen dinners, but that’s about it. Unlike some of our neighbors who did their big grocery shopping Saturday, we didn’t suffer too much with throwing away food. Plus, it gave me a good reason to give the fridge a good scrub-down.

Tomorrow I plan on catching up on some laundry and maybe helping my mom clean up a little. She’s been in NY for the past few days so there’s a lot of work to be done at her house 🙂 My guess is that our power will go out again soon. It’s on now, but they still haven’t removed the branches from the two lines on either side of our block. So, more than likely it’ll go out again *sigh* Oh well.


Sep 05 2008

Check your facts…

Tag: Fun Links and Stuff,General,really..?!Paul C. @ 9:11 am

I’m not big into politics, but I get sick of truth stretching. The republicans did quite a bit of that during their speeches at the National Convention. Here are some specifics picked up by the news agencies Obama isn’t free from the stretching either. That’s why its a good idea to check out http://factcheck.org/


Jul 16 2008

So long, farewell, auf wiedersehen, goodbye!

Tag: Emily,really..?!,WorkEmily @ 2:32 pm

So after a long 6 years, I have decided to leave my job at NorthKey. It’s been a great experience here: my first “real job” during grad school, two internships, an unbelievable job in children’s crisis, great coworkers, great learning experiences, and wonderful friends. After a lot of research, soul-searching and long, drawn out conversations with Paul, family and friends, I decided to take a chance a something new.

I will be the Transition Coordinator for Campbell County High School. Basically, I’ll be working with Title 1, Part D kids (neglected & delinquent) who are transitioning from state agencies, residential facilities, detention center, and alternative school into the regular high school. I’ll be helping them to compile all of their credits from previous placements, do career planning, be a liason to all the agencies they are invovled with, work with their families, hold meetings, and basically monitor them intensely to make sure that they have the resources and safety net that they need to be successful in school. These kids typically get handed a schedule on their first day and told “good luck.” This is a unique position that will keep these kids from falling through the cracks, and work to reduce dropout rates and truancy. Cool stuff.

I’m excited for this new step in my career; it’s better pay, I’ll be in the school systems (one of my long term goals), and of course I get the amazing school schedule ;-).


Jul 01 2008

Don’t ask me how…

Tag: really..?!,SeanAndrewEmily @ 10:33 am

“Don’t ask me how it works, I just know it does.” That’s what a pharmacist told me last night about something I read on the internet.

I’ve been searching for a solution to help Sean with his congestion. He’s started getting congested again a few days ago, and hasn’t been able to sleep in his crib again. I had to sleep sitting straight up with him again on Monday because if he lays down in his crib he gets immediatly stuffed up and can’t breathe. I looked on the internet and saw that Vicks makes a baby rub. I also read that if you put the vicks on the bottom of their feet and put socks on them, that it helps with congestion and coughing. Huh?

Well, I was willing to try anythign so I ran to CVS and the pharmacist there agreed. I took it home, applied it to his feet and put him to bed. He slept 4 hours, woke up briefly, went back to sleep and woke up around 1am for a bottle. Slept again, and woke up at 515am (which has become his new time to start the day…grr). So, he did wake up a bit, but was able to sleep in his crib without lots of congestion! Wow. Amazing. Don’t ask me how it works, but it did. I’m a believer.


May 19 2008

website was hacked

Tag: Computers and Electronics,General,Grrr,really..?!Paul C. @ 3:39 pm

Due to an old version of wordpress, our website was hacked this morning by Q8 and Killer Hack. Looks like I need to bite the bullet and upgrade the wordpress install on here. Doing so may make us lose some features that I’ve added to the theme over time – heck it will likely break the website altogether!  Whatever the case, I will need to take the website offline to fix it.  I will leave the gallery up, but the blog will be down.  If anyone is curious, the hacker used this IP – 80.54.200.2 – to access the site.  They used some kind of exploit on my wordpress version to change my 404.php page to be this:


click to enlarge

This basically gave them a file editor and complete control (as if they had ftp access) to the website.  With it, they browsed folders and upload/overwrote the main index file on this, and other websites I have hosted on this account. It was replaced with this:


click to enlarge

I believe this is the same way/reason our site is providing popup spam.  I haven’t located that yet, but I’ve looked a good deal.  Because of all this, PaulandEmily.com will be briefly going offline for an overhaul.  Probably really needed to anyway.  May get a new theme while I’m at it.


Apr 16 2008

you’re kidding, right?

The Body-laptop interface is knitted from Thneed which nobody, Nobody, NOBODY needs – Engadget

Would you REALLY wear this in public?   Is your spreadsheet REALLY that important?  If so you probably shouldn’t be working on it anyway because if you are in public you are probably on the wireless network at starbucks or the airport and someone is probably sniffing your packets anyway.