here, let me recount to you the entire saga of trying to get furniture from ikea…

april 29th our apartment burned down.

people donated money to us, the apartment complex had us in a new apartment by may 2nd with rental furniture and we decided that we’d get new furniture in the style we wanted rather than as hand me downs, etc. since between what people had been giving us and our savings, etc. we had the money for it. my parents offered to help pay for part of the furniture.

the tuesday after mother’s day (the 10th?) i called ikea to place our order. a couch, a bed, a mattress, a mattress pad. my parents were to be the billing contact, i was who it was supposed to be delivered to. i was told that it would take some time to get some parts of the order to the warehouse for delivery.

three weeks later after a few calls they call my dad (not the main contact for this) and tell him something vague about being ready to deliver the beginning of the next week.

now, at this point my stepmother who has been working in annapolis and NYC realizes she can’t find her wallet and isn’t sure when she would have lost it. she calls it in as missing and calls me to tell me to call ikea back with credit card info for dad’s card instead. so i do.

ikea takes it and disappears. without bothering to tell anyone they decline the card, i find this out when i call them back again. i give them my card info which they take.

ikea calls my dad again the next day to say they were declining my card. at this point they’re using random bits of his info and my info interchangably for the credit card verification so it always fails (his name for my card, fails. his name, his card, my zip code, fails. etc. ad nauseum) add to this mix that his card is associated with the same account that my stepmothers was and his gets blacklisted as being stolen as well so they won’t take that now either.

i call them, i get the names and contact info sorted out and give them my credit card info. they tell me that one of the items is out of stock (again?) and i’ll have to wait another month to get another. i cancel that item and figure "this should fix it" at which point i’m told that in three weeks it will be ready for delivery.

i snap. it’s been a month already, it’s the 3rd of june (i think), i tell them to cancel the order.

i go outside i call andrea we try to decide what to do, eventually i go back inside and make a whole new order from scratch with just my info on it for everything. same items. i’m told that everything is in stock (since it had been sent to the warehouse for our old order) and we just need to wait for the shippers to be ready to deliver it.

wednesday (two and a half weeks later) i get a call from the shippers, they’re ready to bring stuff. the earliest they can come (and i want it soon, now) is on thursday. i get the day off and plan to be there for it.

so yesterday morning at 9 i get a call "they’ll be there between 9 and 1." fine, cool. they show up at 9:30, i’m psyched, i’ll have all afternoon to put stuff together and go out and do stuff. they bring in things in boxes and wrapped in cardboard and plastic and such so you can’t tell what’s what until you get it open. then they bring me the sheet to sign. looking at the stuff they brought in i don’t see anything that would be a king size matress (and that’s sorta hard to miss). they say "oh there wasn’t one in this shipment" i point out it’s on the shipping manifest and they go back to the truck to look. they come back with a mattress. i sign thinking "whew, crisis averted!"

now, we ordered a corner sofa. an L shaped deal. there’s two sections in the living room wrapped in cardboard and plastic and the like. i think "maybe the connector section is something that’s disassembelled and i need to screw the parts together."

there’s no parts for a connector. there’s supposed to be 3 sections for the sofa, i call ikea. the sofa is two lopsided sections with arms on one end and nothing on the other.

i call ikea. having the part shipped will mean it has to be ordered and then go through the delivery process again. 3 weeks, maybe more.

to get rid of it you have to have the delivery people come back and pick it up, 5-10 business days.

order by phone and the stores are two seperate entities, you cannot: A- go to the store and get the part, or, B- return the sofa to the store.

point being: we now have 10 feet of lopsided retarded sofa in our living room WAITING for the delivery people to come and force me to take another day off of work for them to take it away. and they won’t give the money back until they get the sofa back.

i literally don’t know what to do about it any more. we waited so long for it all and they fucked us on it. we try to get rid of it and they fuck us on that. then they hold the money for it which fucks us out of replacing it with anything else until they decide to give the money back.

conclusion: never shopping ikea for anything ever again.

i still haven’t opened the boxes for the bed yet, but i’m terrified that it’s going to be fucked up as well.

Truck hauling bees crashes in Montana

BOZEMAN, Montana (AP) — A tractor-trailer overturned on a curve on a highway, spilling its load of hundreds of bee hives and unleashing some nine million angry honey bees.

The bees buzzed furiously as driver Lane Miller, his arm scraped to the bone, struggled to flee his rig after it overturned Monday in Bear Trap Canyon west of Bozeman. The truck slid across the highway before coming to a stop between guardrails.

and for no visible reason at all, i really want to listen to ministry after that…

gilest.org: Notes on the weblogging schoolchildren

It was the New Statesman’s award shortlist that alerted me to Hangleton Weblogs, and the fact that someone was getting kids aged seven to use weblogs for their school projects. Something worth writing about, I thought.

Now I know there’s been a lot of rubbish written about weblogs in recent years, much of it by journalists who should know better. I know that weblogs are already an “old story” as far as many commissioning editors are concerned. But I think this is a particularly interesting story; these seven-year-olds are the next generation of web users. To think they’ve got the idea of weblogs before they even start senior school is something quite inspiring. In a few more years, when they are studying for A Levels or degrees, what uses are they going to find for weblogs, or the net in general. It will be fascinating to see.

Hangleton Community Junior School Weblogs, the site in question…

it took 4 days for my blog to end up as the #1 search result on google for "i want to have google’s retarded babies." i feel so proud…

well, for windows users this would appear to be the peak of super nifty widgetness for those with gmail. (not to mention something i was hoping would come along evenutally, but i thought we’d have to wait for gmail to get added to the googleAPI.) Gtray sits in your system tray and checks for new gmail at a user defined interval. no more having to keep windows open all the time or logging in over and over again…

huzzah!…

i can only guess that something along the same lines will show up for osX shortly (if not already)…

Andrea: why are you so hot over gmail?
nifkin: i’m not sure
Andrea: its like yahoo mail, but more space
nifkin: yah, pretty much
Andrea:
Andrea: i like it though
nifkin: it’s nice
Andrea: no, you dont think its nice
nifkin: i like the interface better than the other ones i’ve used. simpler
Andrea: you LOVE it
Andrea: you talk about it all over your blog
nifkin: I LOVE IT BECAUSE I LOVE GOOGLE!
Andrea: you want to get into its pants!
nifkin: I WANT TO HAVE GOOGLE’S RETARDED BABIES!

i owe a big ol’ shout out to JAND (who finds bits of goodness for G3RM to keep everyone occupied all day) for being a gentleman, scholar, old dreamless head, and someone kind enough to share his gmail lurve…

raise the glasses high…

so, i did it. i got a gmail account the other day. what’s even more odd is that after two days or so they gave me invites to pass around as well. (don’t ask, they’re gone already.) now i just need to figure out what exactly to do with it. i mean, i already have all those domain names that i can have perfectly good real pop/imap mail with. so what am i supposed to do with a web based mail account (regardless of how much storage it gives me)?…

besides that, this morning i had to stop and get gas. aside from the fact that it’s crazy expensive ($25+ for a tank of gas, wtf?) there was some dude having a crazy screaming match with his girlfriend in the parking lot, eventually she just left him there and he wandered off screaming and stomping into the distance…

Reagan makes one, Ray Charles makes two, who’s gonna be #3?…

god, how could i have forgotten to talk about coming into the office yesterday morning? i parked across the street in the mall parking lot (like i always do), then came across the little pavillion area between there and the building i work in. at which point i’m greeted by a maintenance dude out there with a leaf blower trying to blow all the dead cicada carcasses into a pile so they could clean them up. how screwed up is that. making piles of them. yick…

LOOK! LOOK! It’s my new (well okay, a couple weeks old now) baby Cousin!!! awesome, huh? it’s the daughter of my cousin, so that makes her my second cousin? i never could keep track of how these things work…

okay, i’ve been officially reprimanded for not updating. so here goes…

it rained like a bastard all weekend. cold and craptastic, indeed. but we made a run up to house of tropicals in glen burnie where andrea got three tiny and cute clownfish. so far they don’t have names. not because she can’t think of names for them, but just so that we can wait and see if they survive their crucial first month.

we meant to go to the aquarium on sunday but just couldn’t be assed, it was too gloomy and we were just worn out for no real reason.

STILL waiting to hear about delivery of our furniture from ikea, bastards.

Big, bold butter dogs lap up porno stud roles

ahh, japan, still home of the fucking insane…

when i was in college my friend jay was a huge fan of cheese danishes. i never really understood why, i was always more of a fruit filling (raspberry or cherry being top picks) kind of guy. but he always insisted that cheese danishes were something magical and, well, we sort of let him go ahead and think whatever he wanted (with most of my friends everyone was willing to write off an eccentric obsession or two, his seemed no more unusual that dave’s hatred of nickles).

last night andrea and i went to trader joe’s and andrea picked up a package of their cheese danishes. so this morning (with some trepidation, remembering the little plastic sealed individual ones of yore) i took two in the car with me for breakfast on the way to work. they were awesome, we need to get more of these. i had two and i want MORE, NOW! GIMME!…

a brief note to those of you who might be thinking about trying to order furniture by phone from ikea for delivery: DON’T DO IT! suffice it to say, i’m never trying to buy anything that can’t just be picked up at their store from now on…