Kevin Muldoon

My brother Darren asked if I had seen the AC Transit Bus Fight clip tonight. For those who haven’t seen it, here is a summary for you all.

Basically, a Vietnam Veteran named Tom is sitting on a bus talking about going to a funeral and needing to get his shoes shined. An African American guy across from him hears part of this and thinks that the comment was directed at him. I won’t spoil what happens next.

Original Clip

Good Summary

Interview With Tom

Interview With Michael

Apparently this happened after he left the bus

Hilarious Anime Remix

A summary from Ice Cubes Dad in Friday!

The above is just a few of the videos online about the fight. Search for AC Transit Bus online and you’ll see hundreds of them!

My thoughts? It’s not clear from the clip if Tom did say something racist or if the Michael just picked it up wrong. Though I think Tom did the right thing in the end. He walked away from the problem but when he was attacked he retaliated.

What do you think?

Ouch!

I was really surprised to read today that 3 Google Employees have been convicted in Italy because of a video which shows an autistic teenager being bullied. It goes without saying that no normal person wants to see something as sick as that…but what’s it got to do with Google staff?

They didn’t make the video, upload the video or even review it. They simply cannot review every video which is reviewed. Google did take the video down when someone reported it, so how the hell can they be convicted.

If this rule was passed around the world it would pretty mean the end of online video. I can assure you that there are thousands of sick and disgusting videos on Google, not to mention the racist comments which are listed there too. But do they expect every video to be reviewed before going online? Youtube gets millions of uploads a month, it just isn’t possible to do that.

And would anyone work for a video sharing site such as Youtube, Vimeo or DailyMotion if they knew they could get jailtime for some other asshole uploading a video? I know I wouldn’t.

Absolute madness!

Read more at BBC : Google bosses convicted in Italy

I honestly thought this was just some silly internet clip when I found it. Though apparently this is the advertisement that Red House Furniture used to promote itself around North Carolina (USA).

Oh and before you go, remember to order a T-Shirt!

A week or so ago I decided to sell my HTC Hero (T-Mobile G2 Touch) as I was frustrated by the touchscreen; I really am terrible at typing without hard keys. Therefore I decided to purchase a Blackberry Bold 9700. So far I am loving it, though I usually feel that way for a new phone so i’ll reserve judgement until I’ve had the phone a few months.

I listed my HTC Hero on eBay last week. The phone was sold on the same day as BloggingTips. However, the buyer didn’t pay. He hasn’t replied to the invoice email or my direct email to him over the last few days either (I’ve had the phone all packaged up and ready to go for a week too).

Which is really frustrating as someone else was winning the auction before he sneaked in and clicked on the buy it now button. Unfortunately, I cannot create a resolution until 4 days after the end of the auction. For some reason the next bidder is no longer registered and the one below that didn’t bid high enough for me so I cannot offer a second change offer to them.

So I need to wait to try and resolve this issue so that I don’t pay relisting fees again. Ebay won’t let me leave negative feedback for him either, they only give me the option to resolve the issue….but I can’t do that for another 2 damn days!!

I could just relist the auction just now but I want to make sure this a’hole gets either a warning from ebay or negative feedback from me. Bloody timewasters!

Have you ever met one of your heroes? I’m not really one to get star struck and have never had any interest in hanging around to get autographs or anything like that.

Though they always say that you will be disappointed if you do meet your heroes. I came across a picture which was taken in June 2006 in Las Vegas. Several of us had went over for a week (myself and a friend had been in Boston and New York beforehand as well). Fraser, who took the picture, never emailed the pic on. However, I came across it tonight on my bebo profile (I’m not proud of logging in there, someone had messaged me!).

So here’s what happened. We were walking around the Rio hotel in Vegas watching the World Series of Poker. You can walk around a few feet from the tables and check out the action. We are all big poker fans so we were loving it and got some pictures with some poker stars (I also gave my card to a few players in order to interview them later for the poker community I use to run).

We were standing outside in the lobby when Greg Hemphill walked past me. I wouldn’t go as far as saying he was a hero, however I was (and still am) a big fan of his two shows: the sketch show Chewin the Fat and fantastic Still Game.

I was standing myself when he came out and I just approached him and started chatting away asking how he got put out. I spoke with him for about 5 to 10 minutes about poker and he talked about some hands he played. It was a little surreal actually as neither of us introduced each other, we just chatted away as if we were old mates.

I then asked if I could get a picture and he was more than happy to oblige. So I shouted on my mates to come over for a pic. Due to him sporting a beard, no one realised who he was at first; they just thought it was some guy I knew from back home because of how long we spoke.

The penny soon dropped and we got a pic with him.

The tabloids write so much crap in their columns that you don’t know what’s true and what’s not. They paint some stars to be a’holes.

Thankfully Mr Hemphill was not, far from it. He was incredibly down to earth and was genuinely pleased to see some other Scottish people over in the USA. He came across as a really sound guy.

I doubt many people recognised him over there but in Glasgow he undoubtedly gets people approaching him all the time so you could understand if he couldn’t be bothered talking to fans.

All in all that was a really great day. Frasers girlfriend got a pic with the legend Doyle Brunson and we all got a pic with the previous World Series of Poker winners Joe Hachem and Greg Raymer, both of which were really nice down to earth guys too. They were stopping in the hallway every two minutes to give autographs and they were obliging everyone. Good stuff.

We also got a picture with the Devilfish, but he was a bit of a dick!

Have you ever met anyone famous (or remotely famous)? Were you disappointed or did they turn out to be as nice as you had hoped?

Will this damn season never end!!!

Remember kids, respect your elders!

This time last year I was in Thailand at the start of a 3 month trip. Before going over I secured a year long worldwide travel insurance policy with American Express. I had used a cheaper UK insurance company the previous year but having actually having made a claim and being told that I wasn’t eligible for anything I made the decision to spend a bit more and opt for a ‘good company’.

I was checking my online credit card statement today and I noticed a fee of £128.97 from them. Obviously alarm bells were ringing in my head already because of this because I know how these companies work. People always go on about watching out for small companies and online sites ripping you off but I can assure, the larger brand name companies are just as sneaky, if not more so.

So they had basically had renewed my policy without my consent. I called up today and they told me that they do this for all policies and that this was clearly stated in their documentation before signing up. I don’t recall this ever being stated anywhere when I signed up. I certainly wouldn’t have agreed to this if it had been clearly stated anywhere; so they obviously hid this renewal policy in their incredibly long policy document, which would take a good 2 hours to read.

I complained about this and said that they had no right to do this. The guy on the phone gave me the ’sales talk’ about how they did it to protect customers incase they were away travelling. Complete bullshit; they know that they will make money from people not cancelling their policy. If I had been away for a month and came back to a letter saying they tool £130 off my credit card without my consent I would be very pissed off; particularly because they renew it with a 30 day cancellation policy i.e. if I didn’t notice this coming off my account and called in a months time I would be fucked.

Here’s the annoying thing. I called up last year and said that I only needed 3 months of cover and asked if they could give me a quote and the woman told me to go online and check their annual cover as it works out much cheaper in the long run, particularly if you go away on another holiday. So instead of 3 months they somehow managed to take 2 years off me. Bastards!

And here’s another annoying thing. I had to send cash from my current account to my credit card right away to avoid getting interest on it as they said it will take 5 working days to give me back my money and it happened a week ago so there was a good chance I had to pay interest on it.

I still lose out

When (if!) they do refund my money, it will simply give me a positive amount on my credit card. I cannot transfer this to my current account. So either way, they have fucked me over by this.

I don’t live in a dream world. I know they use these tactics as many people will forget to cancel their policy and if they try after 30 days they can say “Sorry but we can’t help you”. The media have been highly critical of companies selling products via trials and then signing them up to automatic renewals (teeth whitening etc), yet they don’t seem to have a problem with huge companies like American Express using the same tactics.

There is nothing I can do. In todays society all you can do when something like this happens is bend over and let them give it to you. It won’t hurt them, but I will personally never use them ever again; not for insurance or credit cards or anything, and I will make a point of telling others about their dodgy tactics too.

Double Standards

I wonder where, from a legal point of view, we all stand if we did the same to them. What would the courts say if I sent them a letter saying that I was going to walk into their office in one months time and take £100 out of their cash register unless they sent me a ‘cancellation letter’. Would I get into trouble for this? Probably so.

Perhaps you are not allowed to fuck people over individually. What if I create a company and tell my staff to send letters to 100 American Express offices telling them that we will take £100 from their cash register unless they reply. Maybe that would be legal in the eyes of the law.

The fact is, we have no power. If American Express had told me that I couldn’t get a refund then there would be little I could do. I use my credit card a lot for protection against companies going bust etc; but I very much doubt Master Card would have followed up a claim against American Express for taking money out of my account. I called Visa up a few years ago because Scan Computers had send me a broken motherboard and wouldn’t refund the money and Visa said that they couldn’t even open up a claim.

Watch out

Unfortunately, I doubt this will be the last time something like this happens. Many companies, small and large, are happy to rip off their customers using sneaky tactics like this if it makes them more money collectively. However, the more they fuck people over, the more people will go elsewhere.

Or so you would think. Unfortunately, many people have short memories and these companies have large advertising budgets to bring in more customers every week. When they lose one customer, they can use the extra revenue they brought in from ripping them off to find a new one.

Also, think about this whole thing collectively. They took about £130 from me. Let’s assume they did this with 10,000 people in the UK as well. That’s 1.3 million pounds sitting in their accounts at least for a few weeks. Which will earn them a good amount of interest. And that’s only counting the UK. Worldwide they probably earn interest on hundreds of millions of pounds using this method every year.

Just be aware of automatic renewal when you signing up for anything online, particularly things which are priced monthly or yearly. If you don’t, you might find yourself in a fight to get your own money back

Kevin

This is probably the most useful thing you will learn this year. OK, perhaps not if you don’t eat bananas that often.

I personally eat bananas several times a week so I was amazed that there was a quicker way to get my potassium fix. We need to give more credit to those damned dirty apes. Damn them. God damn them all to hell!!

p.s. Due to my natural scepticism, I immediately went and opened a banana this way to see if it works (It did!). I am simply amazed at how easy it is to amaze me