Dear Kevin Fox:

Thank you for your inquiry about your service fee.

As of today, we have reimbursed your missing $0.25 and have corrected the billing error. Your reference number for this transaction is RB9430442. We apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused you.

If we can be of any further assistance, please email us or call us anytime at 1-800-956-4442.

Sincerely,
Online Customer Service

Yay!

Every now and then I or a friend misspells a word and the misspelling completely replaces the original in my written (and sometimes verbal) vocabulary, or at least my vocabulary with that person.

Some of my favorites 'disspellings' are:

• broken: ab0rken
• phereomone: pherognome
• porn: pron (common usage)
• remedy: rememdy
• spellcheck: spekkcheck

Do you have any disspellings? What are they?

This is my life:

From: Kevin Fox
To: Wells Fargo Customer Service

To whom it may concern:

On Saturday I went to the Downtown Berkeley Wells Fargo branch, and gave the teller $20 for two $10 rolls of quarters. Later, upon examining the rolls side-by-side, I noted that they weren't the same size. Counting (twice) revealed that one of the rolls contained only 39 quarters, or $9.75.

I would appreciate it if you would remit the remaining $0.25 into my checking account.

Thank you very much for your time.

Sincerely,
Kevin Fox

I'll keep you posted.

Okay, that's got to sound strange, but I live in a very strange building. One of the oddest things is that there has been *no* cold-running water for over a year. That's right, only hot and very hot, which is great from a showering perspective, except for very early in the morning (between 5 and 6) when it's just above lukewarm and just above lukewarm. Terrible showering water.

Anyhow, I turned on my faucet this morning and cold water came out, and it stayed cold. It was actually a weird thrill to be able to control the temperature by choosing more or less hot or cold water. The bathroom sinks at Yahoo! have IR sensors and no temperature control, so I haven't had any daily temperature control in just about forever.

The most disquieting thing was going to the toilet right after someone else and finding not just the seat warm, but *steam* rising from the bowl, buffeting ones unmentionables.

It's a brave new world of cold water. Ahh...

Well, it looks like yahoo has to recall the trillion plus web pages they've delivered in the last five years and two months.

It seems that back in '96, when Yahoo! was granted the registered trademark 'Yahoo!', they updated the home-page graphic to suit, but in so doing, there was a casualty: Timmy, otherwise now known here at Yahoo! as 'Pixel #2899.' I call him Timmy because he went away the same day that the 'TM' was replaced with the 'R'.

So what can be done? Timmy's disappearance has gone unnoticed for five years and has only just been noticed by one of our own visual designers, browsing through the world-wide web archive. Now the hunt is on to find Timmy, and bring him home.

Watch the saga! Reload your Yahoo! home page every day (or hour, minute, whatever) and watch for Timmy's return!

If you happen to find Timmy, be he in your recycle bin, a porn popup, or changed into a transparent gif, let me know! Please put Timmy on your site and post the link in this post's comments! I'll see to it that Timmy is returned to the Yahoo! signboard safe and sound.

And for all the cynics, this isn't some marketing ploy, 5 years in the making. The error was found this morning, and I'm just having fun with it, as we all know I am want to do. :-)

I got an anonymous email today from someone purporting to know the stats of a forthcoming iPad.

While the stats describe a machine marginally different than the full-size 'thin-client' tablet I had envisioned, they (not the spelling errors in the spec sheet) have an air of credibility. It makes sense.

I'll do a more complete write-up later, but in short, the iPad, as described, would be a handheld (3" by 4.5" by 0.8") half-pound device with a high-density 256x512 pixel 16-color touchscreen, a thin version of Mac OSX, and a firewire port.

The only real miss in the product seems to be a lack of wireless, depending on a firewire adapter. That seems pretty silly to me, but then it seems to be intended as more of an unfettered device than the 'around-the-house' iPad I envisioned. This is much more a star-trek 'padd' device.

Base price: $550

Release date: Unknown

Rumor validity: 5 on a scale of 10

When I was five (think 1978, just after Star Wars came out) my mom got Susie and me a video game console. State of the Art. Pong. Too cool.

What's even cooler is that a couple years ago I found the same model on eBay and got it for $30, and hooked it up to my 36" TV. Man that's some fun flashbacking.

Experience your own flashback, and take a peek at the zen of pong.

If pong's before your time, then check the Fury archives for something even funnier: Old School Video Games.

---

"Computer games don't affect kids; I mean if Pac-Man affected us as kids, we'd all be running around in dark rooms munching magic pills and listening to repetitive electronic music."

I've been getting a lot of 'friends and family' discounts passed to me recently, and since the companies seem to want people to pass it along again and again, I suppose I should post them.

30% discount at Gap (and gaplet) Real-World Stores this weekend