theinformedvegan:

The Hershey Park zoo in Harrisburg, PA is catching some well-deserved flack after zookeepers shot two beloved bison to death to “spare them” from rising flood waters.

Remnants from tropical storm Lee are soaking the East Coast and causing flood waters to rise rapidly. The Hershey Park zoo evacuated many of the animals there but had neglected to plan an escape for two bison. Fearing that the two would drown if water continued to rise, zoo keepers took a gun and shot the bison to death.

What the zoo calls a “euthanasia” feels more like a mob-style execution. The zoo had at least two days to prepare an evacuation but failed to act. A Facebook group made to honor the two bison and bring attention to the zoo’s inaction already has close to 4,000 likes and is quickly growing.

However deranged, the zoo may have actually believed they were operating with good intentions. The problem is that the whole situation could have been avoided if they had planned ahead.

Shit like this infuriates me.

To whom it may concern,

My 6 year-old son and I went to They Might be Giants at the Theatre of Living Arts in Philadelphia on Saturday Nov. 21. For the most part, we had a great time. We both love live music and we both love They Might be Giants. However I have one complaint, the unavoidable $5 charge for each ticket.

I considered buying tickets online, but saw there was a $5 charge for credit card purchases so I opted to buy tickets at the door. Signs posted at the box office confirmed the $5 charge. I ordered two tickets - one for me, one for my son (by the way, making a 6 year-old pay full price for show where the stage is above his head is outrageous, but that’s another issue) - and was shocked when the cashier said the price was $10 more than I expected. I asked if there was a way to avoid the fees, and was told there was not - even if I paid in cash.

Had I been alone, I would have left on principle.

Demanding an extra $5 per ticket is not a “fee.” It’s misleading and infuriating. You might as well say the tickets are $30 instead of $25. I’ll never pay for a LiveNation event again until that policy changes.

Sincerely,
mattack

—————
edit: Shortly after sending the above letter via LiveNation’s customer service form, I got a response. The emphasis is mine.

—————

Response (Christy) 11/23/2009 11:41 PM
Hello Fan,

Thank you for contacting the Live Nation Customer Care Team.

The entire face value of the ticket as it appears before fees goes directly to the artist that is performing. The ticket fees are then distributed between Live Nation, the venue, and the promoters of the event. These fees are used for technical assistance, printing and shipping costs, website maintenance, and overall costs of putting on a large scale event. This also includes a processing charge for using a credit card online without a signature.

I apologize if you found these fees to be excessive. The purpose of these fees is to offset the costs of concert production, promotion, and ticketing. If you wish to purchase tickets at a reduced rate, I would recommend that you visit www.LiveNation.com to check for discounted promotion or purchase tickets at the venue box office.

We are always looking for new ways to improve on the fan experience. If you need more help with this or any other question you can reply to this email, contact us by phone at 877.LYV.TIXS (877.598.8497), or find us online at www.LiveNation.com.

Please tell us how we’re doing:

http://survey2.livenation.com/mrIWeb/mrIWeb.dll?I.Project=CUSTOMERCARE09

Shop your favorite artist music & merch at www.livenation.com/fanStore

Regards,
Christy
Live Nation Ticketing Customer Care Representative

—————

My response:

Wow… You don’t really expect me to believe that, do you? “The entire face value of the ticket as it appears before fees goes directly to the artist that is performing.”

That’s simply not true.

I’ve been in bands. I’ve played concerts all over the world, in venues ranging from basements to arenas. That’s just not the way it works. You know it. I know it.

I just wanted to file a complaint and let you know you lost a customer.

Sincerely,
mattack

—————

A little math is in order here… Suppose it’s true “the entire face value of the ticket as it appears before fees goes directly to the artist that is performing.” I estimate there were around 800 people attending. At $25 a person, LiveNation wants me to believe they paid They Might be Giants $20,000 just for playing? I don’t believe it.

I never thought I’d be blogging about my successes with a Microsoft product, ever. But I just had a big success with Powershell. We need to add proxy email addresses to existing mailboxes in bulk. I created a .CSV file with two columns, the email address to add and the mailbox to add it to.


email, mailbox
email1@example.com, mailbox1
email2@example.com, mailbox2



Import-CSV "Path\to\file.csv" | foreach {
>> $foo = get-mailbox $_.mailbox
>> $foo.EmailAddresses +=$_.email
>> $foo | set-mailbox}
>>


I need some help… One of the gifts I received for Sparkle Season was an iPod Touch (2nd Gen). This thing is an awesome little device, but so closely tied to iTunes it makes me sick. You can’t even turn it on for the first time without syncing it to iTunes! As far as I know, the only way to get music on a 2nd generation iPod Touch is via iTunes.

So I pulled out my old Mac, installed the latest Tunes, made my music folder a samba share (read only) on my Linux box, and pointed the Mac’s iTunes library to it. Seems to work okay, except that iTunes doesn’t recognize some of the ID3 tags for a large portion of files… This is extremely frustrating and I can’t seem to correct it.

All of MP3s are tagged with ID3v2.4 tags only. I stripped any other tag format (ID3v2.3, ID3v1, and even some APE tags!) using a variety of tools: eyeD3, Mp3tag (using wine) and EasyTag. Everything else I open the files in shows the tags correctly: Amarok, EasyTag, Mp3tag, SqueezeCenter, etc… Not iTunes…

I refuse to give iTunes write permission to my MP3 collection. It’s shared with Amarok and a SqueezeBox. I’ve already spent too much time mucking around with tags to get them to be consistent between those two.

Anyone have any idea why iTunes won’t recognize the tags? Or is there better way to get music from my Linux machine into iTunes so I can sync it with my iPod Touch?

In an effort to do more programming, I’ve decided to start doing Project Euler problems. To quote the website:

Project Euler is a series of challenging mathematical/computer programming problems that will require more than just mathematical insights to solve. Although mathematics will help you arrive at elegant and efficient methods, the use of a computer and programming skills will be required to solve most problems.

#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use warnings;

my ( $index, $sum );

foreach $index ( 1 .. 999 ) {
    if ( $index / 3 == int( $index / 3 ) or $index / 5 == int( $index / 5 ) ) {
        $sum += $index;
    }
}

print "$sum \n";

Earlier tonight, my daughter tried opening a .docx file she had created at school. Her computer has an older version of Microsoft Office (2003 I think), and of course it didn’t open. Having run into this problem before, I downloaded and installed the Microsoft Office Compatibility pack. That didn’t work either…

I took a copy of the file to my computer (it runs Ubuntu) and tried to open it. OpenOffice.org Writer didn’t open it either. My friend Google led to many sites with alleged solutions for my problem.  None worked, until I found this post. It was easy, and worked like a charm.

Here’s what you do. Download this and extract the files. The README.txt file has all the information you need, but here’s the steps.

Open a terminal, cd into the directory where the extracted files are, and run the following commands:

sudo cp OdfConverter /usr/lib/openoffice/program/

sudo cp MOOXFilter_cpp.xcu /usr/lib/openoffice/share/registry/modules/org/openoffice/TypeDetection/Filter/

sudo cp MOOXTypeDetection.xcu /usr/lib/openoffice/share/registry/modules/org/openoffice/TypeDetection/Types/

Since updating Ubuntu to Intrepid, I’ve been having issues with Amarok and my iPod. Mostly Amarok has not been ejecting the iPod correctly. Seems the old post-disconnect command, kdeeject, isn’t in the new release. After a little bit of research and troubleshooting, I found the new, correct command.
umount %m && eject /dev/sdc2
This unmounts and ejects the iPod without errors. The %m refers to the mount point. For some reason using eject %d (%d for device) in the Amarok post-eject command ejected my DVD drive!
To determine the device node, I used gnome-eject --display-settings -p /media/IPOD
which among other things, told me this:
Resolved pseudonym "/media/IPOD" -> /dev/sdc2

…or how I learned to start worrying and hack my own computer

1. Reboot


2. When presented with the Grub menu, select a working kernel and boot into Recovery Mode.


3. Eventually you are presented with a menu, one option is root shell.

Adrian’s parents came to town on Friday for a short visit. Yesterday, after much debate and lack of momentum, we decided to go to Adventure Aquarium in Camden. A good time was had by all. We saw some really neat stuff: swimming hippos, feeding penguins, piranhas, sharks and a whole lot of other fish. Many fish were touched in the touching area. Miles was a little creeped out by the sharks and some of us had small bouts of nausea from looking through glass several inches thick. There are pictures of some of the highlights here (or you can click the photo, left).

Afterwards we went to Kingdom of Vegetarians, as is the tradition when A’s parents are in Philly. Miles strayed from his usual food fearlful self and tried new foods, including Lemon Chicken, a spring roll, and plum sauce.