ThinkingSkull.com

Like almost half of the US population, I enjoy an annual trek home for the Thanksgiving holiday. My main destination is my grandparents’ farm in central West Virginia with stops at other friends and family all around the state. Normally I drive (something I actually look forward to), but this year I’m going to do something I’ve always dreaded based on the horror stories alone: fly.

It’s not the “getting to” that’s bad, because most of those trips are staggered throughout the week depending on your job and the vacation days you have off. It’s the “coming back from” that haunts you, when almost everyone has to get home by the Monday after. And should I somehow arrive on time (or close enough) unscathed and with all the bags I left with, what terrible airborne disease spread across the nation will I bring back to share with my friends and co-workers?

Yeah, kinda bored. Could ya tell?

Part of my current job is to apply an online store’s tool set to conform to the kind of selling an owner wants for their store. Sadly, this often can create a severe case of unnecessary over-complication, because teaching a computer program that a mix-and-match sale item with four different SKUs (that must also be able to apply a series of product-specific quantity discounts to the final invoice) isn’t an easy task.

Whoever tried to explain how to do this to the store owner the first time may have figured out how to make it work, but creating a series of product discounts for each flavor prevents the individual flavors from being mixed and matched unless you create a series of conditions for each and every possibility… up to twenty-four! For example, you get a discount if you buy three items in any flavor, which means if you buy three strawberry-flavored items or buy three chocolate-flavored items that you get a discount. Unfortunately, the store program doesn’t understand that two strawberry and one chocolate is ALSO three items because it’s a product promotion and not a store-wide promotion.

The fix sounds complicated, but is actually very simple: don’t over-complicate it to begin with. If there is only one product with a choice of four flavors, you can use attribute editing to give each flavor a separate SKU, then create a series of product promotions for three, four, or full-case discounts. It’s simpler, it easier to set up, and you could add more flavors later without rebuilding the product from the ground up.

Is it smarter to think up an easier way to do something to get out of doing it the hard way? Nah. After all, laziness IS the “mother of invention.”

Barack Obama defeated John McCain in their bids for the Presidency. Do you think Obama would have been so gracious toward his opponent had he been the one making a speech after conceding to McCain?

Please do not adjust your sets. The Democrats control the horizontal and the vertical, so please return your trays to their full upright position and smoke ‘em if ya got ‘em.

Twas the night before Election Day, and all through the nation,
People worried about housing, economics and taxation.

The voters were all dressed in theirs blues and their reds,
While visions of prosperity danced in their heads.

On televisions and radios still churned such a clatter,
From promises and double-talk that hardly still mattered.

From uneducated children arose such a riddle:
Who plays tug-of-war with an old man in the middle?

Obama and Biden versus Palin and McCain,
With poor Uncle Sam enduring the strain.

But when tomorrow is over we’ll be in the know,
(Unless Florida screws up like eight years ago).

And after this election has faded from sight,
We’ll have ’till the next to debate who was right.