brettbrewer.com

Wow, I have haven't come upon a company this shady since SuperMicro in the '90s. I recently made the mistake of doing a Froogle search for a Casio Exilim EX-V8 8MP Digital Camera with 7x Anti-Shake Optical Zoom. I found the cheapest price at site called Preferred Photo (preferredphoto.com) and placed an order for the refurbished model. I then recieved a followup email telling me to call them to expidite my order. Since I'm not in a hurry I did't bother calling them and instead did a little research on the company so that I would know what to expect if I had to talk to them about anything. Immediately I found droves of forum postings warning people to steer clear of this company. Most people were telling stories of the salespeople calling them and claiming they purchased a "Japanese version" of the camera and that they needed to spend $100 more to get a US version. Others were told that the camera would only come equipped with a "10 minute battery". Basically they won't ship your order until they talk to you and try to upsell you a bunch of overpriced junk and tack on some shipping and handling fees. Well, sure enough that's exactly what happened to me. They called me today around noon to try to upsell me a longer life battery, a warranty, and then after I refused everything they still gave me an order total that was $20 more than my original order. I told them just to send the camera and initally agreed to the extra charges because I didn't realize there WERE any. After I checked my original order receipt I realized they had still scammed me out of an extra $20 in hidden "handling fees" which were not listed on my original orders. I immediately called them back. After a few minutes on hold I ended up talking to the same guy who had tried to upsell me the junk. He wanted to know why I was cancelling my order so I lit into him with such a torrent of consumer angst that he almost immediately gave in and agreed to refund my order. We shall see if it is actually refunded in full or if this saga continues to garner them the kind of publicity they don't want. After doing a bit of research, I've discovered that this company is doing business under a variety of web sites. Normally I am loathe to mention the specific names of companies that piss me off on my web site as I generally consider it to be unprofessional, but I'm making an exception here because I feel since many of the visitors of my site are pretty likely to be into digital photography that everyone who visits my site should know about this horrible company. SO, here is a list of the camera sites that you should avoid at all costs:

• Broadway Photo - http://www.bwayphoto.com/
• A&M Photo World - http://www.amphotoworld.com/
• Regal Camera - http://www.regalcamera.com/
• Prestige Camera - http://www.prestigecamera.com/
• Preferred Photo - http://www.preferredphoto.com
• Royal Camera - http://www.royalcameras.com/

You can do a google search for the name of any of these sites and the first link will be a link to the company and the second link will be a link to a horror story about them. In fact, Royal Camera isn't even showing up in the #1 spot for their own name...a negative review of them is the #1 search result .

But don't take my word for it, here's what other people have to say about these incredibly shady web sites:

• Broadway Photo Ripoff
• Reseller ratings for Broadway Photo / A&M Photo World, Regal Camera, Prestige Camera, Preferred Photo, Royal Camera, more
• Stay Away from Royal Camera
  
• Reseller ratings for Royal Camera and A&M Photo World

Sigh.....I could find hundreds of similar stories, but I feel much better now and should really be working. I'll probably just end up ordering from Amazon if I can't find a better reseller to re-buy this camera from.

UPDATE: I did receive an email from PreferredPhoto.com shortly after I cancelled my order stating that  my order would be refunded in full and that I should see the credit on my account within 24-48 hours. I will post another update once I know if my card was really refunded in full.  

I ran across a slight problem recently when I wanted to change the default magnifying glass cursor used by the AMAZING Highslide JS javascript library . If you need zooming thumbnails or any other kind of popup-window based content, the Highslide JS library is your cross-browser compatible popup saviour.  The library uses both javascript and CSS to define custom cursors for when you have your mouse over a zoomable image. I was scratching my head wondering where to change the cursor so that I could use the htmlExpander feature with a graphic button on some parts of my site while still being able to use the default magnifying glass cursor for all other images. This turned out to be a no brainer after I realized I just needed to override the cursor property using an inline style on any element that I want to use an alternate cursor on. In my case, to get the normal hand pointer that normally appears on links to show up, simply add an inline style to your button such as 

<img src="/graphics/some_button_image.gif" style="cursor:pointer;" /> 

I don't know why the hand cursor is called "pointer" in CSS, but it is. Seems to me they should call the standard arrow cursor "pointer" and call the hand cursor "hand". Anyway, I know this seems trivial, but the HighSlide JS web site does not mention how to do this, so I thought I'd share it here. 

It's amazing. I've been doing CSS-based layout since about 2001 and I still discover new css browser bugs and annoyances daily. Here's a solution to my latest gripe....radio button layout in Internet Explorer. It seems that IE does not like to properly lay out a radio button on the text baseline when using font sizes of 12px or smaller no matter what you do. You can mess with the "vertical-align" attribute and adjust margins until you're blue in the face and you will never be able to align radio buttons with an 11pixel font using CSS unless you explicity set the size of your radio buttons. In IE, radio buttons seem to default to a visual display size of about 12x12 pixels, but they always seem to take up some extra layout space with some padding or margins that you can never get rid of. Fortunately there's an easy fix for this...simply specify a style for all your radio buttons with a specific width and height of 12px. Then you can lay out your buttons and they will align properly with an 11px font size. If you have trouble properly aligning your radio buttons with their labels in IE, just adjust the radio button dimensions to match the pixel size of your font and you should be good to go. The same should hold true if you are using relative font sizes.

Hate IE. Hate it real good. In fact, I'd like to encourage you to hate all modern browsers. Yes Firefox too. They are all STILL rife with CSS display bugs that continue to make it much harder than it should be to perform the formerly simple design task of drawing a box on a screen that can fit its contents. 

I've been a somewhat sporadic user of podcasts over the past couple of years. I really like the concept, but until recently the best solutions I have found were really geared more toward desktop use, such as the popular open-source podcast reciever called Juice . Of course, I prefer to listen to my podcasts on a portable mp3 player, and sadly, there is not a single piece of standard software for any of the major players that does a good job with managing podcasts for a portable device. The Zune software is minimalist and lame. Don't even get me started about iTunes either. iTunes is a menace that is guaranteed to make your PC run slower than...well...slower that if it didn't have iTunes. Perhaps it doesn't totally suck on the MacOS, but on Windows it's the first piece of software I uninstall any time I see it polluting the hard drive of anyone who doesn't specifically need it for their iPod to function properly (yet another reason NOT to buy an iPod).

Anyway, my main gripe with most of the standard MP3 player software out there is that if you want to sync your podcasts while you are away from your primary PC, you are generally S.O.L. unless you waste a bunch of time configuring multiple computers with your podcast settings. Recently though, I heard a commercial at the end of the Slashdot Review podcast for a piece of software from Podcastready.com called "MyPodder ". I am happy to say that this software, combined with Podcastready's online podcast aggregation service is the solution I've been waiting for. Instead of installing the software on your PC, you install it on the portable device. You can then plug the device into any computer with a USB port and an internet connection and sync your podcasts directly to your portable device via your free account a Podcastready.com. I was already using PodNova.com to aggregate my feeds, so I was able to simply point Podcastready.com at my OPML URL from PodNova.com and it picked up all my feeds. Now when I want to sync my portable device with my podcasts, I just plug it into whatever PC I happen to be near and the files are synced. The real upshot of this is that it makes those formerly useless little 512MB MP3 players into something truly functional again. Let's face it, 512MB is waaaaaaay too small for most people to use for their music, but as a dedicated podcast device, 512MB is really plenty of room unless you plan on archiving your podcasts on your portable device which would be sort of silly.

ANYWAY, I now have a use for my puny, but highly portable 512MB Sansa m230. I got it as a gift this Festivus and I didn't think I would really have a use for it since it's too small to hold much music, but as a podcast player it works great.  It has just enough room to hold the podcast software and the latest episode of all my favorite podcasts and it has a looooong battery life. So check out MyPodder if you are looking for a way to sync your podcasts directly to your mp3 player and cut out the middleware!