Over the past year, my copy of Radio has slowly become swollen and bloated. Various additions, hacks, 3rd party tools and Userland updates have become so intertwined and tangled that I could no longer tell whose fault it was when something didn't work as expected. Since I couldn't place the blame, I couldn't fix the problems.

Today, I moved a few posts over to a fresh copy of Radio and everything works as expected again. Much better. Now I just need to learn more about CSS so I can fix up the sidebar to my satisfaction.

This weblog has always been a stealth blog - most of the activity has been behind the scenes and intended for my own personal use. I've decided to move everything into the open, which is why this weblog is now named after me.

I bought Lisa a 20 GB iPod for Christmas, but failed to notice she had put the 20 GB iPod (Win) version on her wish list, when she actually needed a 20 GB (Mac). This meant the iPod had to be returned.

I shipped the iPod back to Amazon on Dec 26th. That's where the problems began:

Jan 8, 2003 2:17 P.M. LEXINGTON, KY, US DELIVERY
Jan 6, 2003 5:51 P.M. HODGKINS, IL, US ARRIVAL SCAN
Dec 31, 2002 4:15 A.M. REDMOND, WA, US DEPARTURE SCAN
Dec 26, 2002 10:52 P.M. US BILLING INFORMATION RECEIVED

I realize the traffic generally sucks in the area around Seattle, but does it really take that long to get from Vashon Island to Redmond? I could walk there faster than that.

I dutifully tracked the package until I saw that it had arrived in Lexington as promised, but I have yet to receive the e-mail Amazon is supposed to send me me when I have been given a refund.

Tonight, I checked the status of my order and saw that I have been credited for the return, but the amount I was refunded is not the same as what I originally paid. I paid $499.00, but I was only given a credit for $492.98.

It appears that instead of giving me a credit for the amount I paid, Amazon gave me a credit for the current price of an iPod. But no, that can't be true because the current price of a 20 GB iPod is $493.99.

Has Amazon returned to their widely renounced policy of variable pricing?

There is one other interesting discrepency in my order: I bought a DVD and the iPod in the same order. The total price for the DVD, including shiping, handling, and taxes was $17.37 and the total price for the iPod was $554.85. 17.37 + 554.85 = 572.22, but Amazon charged me $572.23. What's the deal with that? I really doubt it is a rounding error. Is Amazon so desperate to make a profit that they need to steal the extra penny here and there?

Update: I sent a polite complaint to Amazon. After a few days, I got a response in which they apologized and offered me a credit for a different amount. This time I got a credit for the original price I paid for the iPod minus the return shipping. But wait, the return shipping was $1.98 and the amount deducted from my credit was $11.97. $11.97 is the amount of the original shipping charge of both the iPod and the DVD plus Washington State sales tax on the shipping. Even stranger, there was a 3 cent discrepency in Amazon's favor for the credited amount.

So, I sent yet another polite complaint, in which I expressed my continuing confusion over the amount of my refund. I even suggested what I thought my refund should be.

Enough time went by that I feared I would never find out what my refund should actually be, but then I got another reply which again apologized for the mistake and offered me a refund for the total amount I had paid, including the iPod, the DVD, the shipping, and the sales tax.

Even though I still do not understand what exactly Amazon's return policy is, I decided it is time to give up even though they never addressed the 1 cent and 3 cent discrepencies.

I'd love to clear 4 cents on every transaction I make.

I met a spy at a Christmas party last weekend. He's an honest to God retired spy from back in the days when men, and women, did the work we rely on satellites for today.

He spent 33 years in the Foreign Service, 16 of them abroad. He's been to Russia, China, Mongolia, Japan, Thailand, Cambodia... well you get the idea. You now know as much as I do about what he did.

He is tall, square-jawed and handsome. Picture an American version of James Bond, but without all the smarminess. He is very polite, articulate, well read and well spoken. He exudes the sense of ease that only comes with knowing the World is a better place as a result of one's own place in it. He's one of the most interesting people I've ever met.

As you would expect from someone who made their living doing things that must have been insanely dangerous, he was not particularly forthcoming with details about himself. He was however, really good at putting others at ease. I suspect it's a skill he put to good use in his in his field of work.

The Hostess of the party was his daughter. She told us some of the most astounding things: her father worked in the field with her mother, who taught herself to take notes surreptitiously using a nub of a pencil with her hand in her pocket! Low tech and human seems to have worked much better then than high tech and distant does today.

There was one thing she told us I will never forget: her father says as long as we have an infantry, we'll be OK. As long as we have people among us who have personally witnessed the horror that is war, we will not be so quick to think war is the answer. We're screwed as soon as we think we can fight wars from a distance.

Our current political regime seems to be very distant from that notion.

A quick hack to play with Userland's Aggregator API. Something I've been wanting to do for a long time.

Distance: 15.4 Miles (Round trip) Elevation: 6,400 Feet
Elevation Gain: 4304 Feet (Round trip)

This hike offered a lot of great views of Mt. Rainier. Spray Park is very pretty with a lot of ponds and a series of meadows. It is not flat.

Next time, I say we do this as a day hike. We lost 1200 feet in elevation down to Cataract Camp and there is nothing to see once you get there.

Finally, the bugs have diminished, but there are other pests around who can be just as annoying. We were camped fairly close to some dope smoking insomniacs who managed to wake me up several times as they wandererd back and forth through the camp for no apparent reason, talking about weird random stuff that made no sense.

Spray Falls is well worth the short side-trip.

Distance: 6.5 Miles (Round trip)

For this trip, we decided to do some car camping and day hike to Toleak Point. Unfortunately, we didn't check the tide charts before we left home and we didn't know there was going to be a weak ebb tide which wouldn't leave us enough time to get to Toleak Point and back before the tide was too high for us to reach Taylor Point on the return.

We still had a nice hike to the beach at Scotts Bluff where we saw three sea otters. The otters were very curious about us and would swim in for a closer look and then duck under the water and reappear 30 feet away. They did this for about ten minutes until the largest otter reared up out of the water and pushed the head of smaller one under the surface as if to say, "I said we are leaving!" The otters then vanished.

Most of the headlands are impassable and require hiking inland and up very steep trails assisted by ropes and wood-and-cable ladders. The ladders are usually wet and slippery and take a little care to negotiate safely. A word to the wise: avoid the gold colored clay unless you are an expert skier. The gold clay is hard and very, very slippery.

It rained amazingly hard the second night. Every time we thought it couldn't rain any harder, we were proven wrong a moment later. The tent kept us nice and dry except where the corner by my feet was in a 3 inch deep puddle and leaked a little.

The next day, we stopped at all the Kalaloch beaches. Amazingly, two of the beaches have been so little used that the trails have all but disappeared.

We experienced a lot of the typical damp Olympic Coast weather, but, as always, there were many beautiful sights to see.

Distance: 15 Miles (Round trip)
Elevation: 5,500 Feet
Elevation Gain: 3350 Feet (Round trip)

The hikes are getting easier by the week. This one was a piece of cake, partially because it is a stock trail and partially because we are getting stronger.

Unfortunately, this hike was also a bummer in some ways. We passed by Squaw Lake on the way up and it is very pretty, but also was the scene of the worst camp fire desecration I've ever seen. I stopped doing Alpine Lakes hikes a long time ago because of the crowds and the constant reminders of how stupid and destructive people can be.

Live trees don't burn for shit, so don't chop then down and try to burn them. When the signs say campfires are prohibited, does it mean you can go ahead and burn things as long as you are trying to start a forest fire? Bigger is not always better.

This hike was both ying and yang. We ran into several interesting parties of hikers and had a good time talking to them. We also got dorked out of a good campsite by a passive aggressive "southbound PCTer" who ignored the fact that our stuff was already there. It was either kill him or find another spot, so we did the latter. We ended up in a very nice place.

During the night, there were moments of loud thudding sounds. I guessed they were deer walking on some of the hollow boggy sections around us, but it was hard to tell because Lisa was thrashing in her sleeping bag so much I couldn't hear well. I found out later she was doing it on purpose because the noises were scaring her and she didn't want to hear them.

One of the more annoying things about this hike: from the top of Cathedral Pass, Deep Lake is about 1/2 mile away and about 1200 feet down, but, being a "horse" trail, it takes almost three miles to get to the lake after you first sight it. Horse trails have very flat switchbacks which just encourage people and horses to cut them. I never cut switchbacks, but this trail severely tempted me.

The Lake itself is beautiful, but very over-used. Even though there are multiple signs telling stock (horse) campers to camp elsewhere, most of the campsites have horse prints and horse shit all over them.

There are multitudes of ground squirrels and Clark's Nutcrackers, so your food is imperiled if you aren't careful, otherwise it was mostly a bug-free and enjoyable hike.