Dear Ben,

We have recently attempted to purchase the Consumerist (please see below). We are concerned that our offer is not being taken seriously. We have recently taken on increasing financial backing. Please see here: http://blog.3bulls.net/?p=2216

Here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/32478419@N05/3035979777/

And Here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/32478419@N05/3037767183/

You will note the latter is a very valuable, in fact almost priceless, image of a spider playing Wii. I trust we will be able to wrap up this sale in due course. We will make every effort to gainfully employ all Consumerist employees with no changes. Salaries of course will be in spider money equivalents. We assume this will entail almost no lifestyle changes for you and your employees.

Best,
P. Punko

Here's the original offer referenced above, which was sent to Gaby:

To Whom It May Concern,

I am writing to inquire as the the purchase price of the website "Consumerist." I am wanting to inquire if the commenters will also be included in the purchase? Is it possible that they will not be included for a discount? I think I can automate the Consumerist commenting using a simple algorithm. First, I will have one commenter complain that it is the consumers fault, whatever the problem may be. Second I will have another commenter call someone a "jackass" for yelling at a customer service rep. Finally I will have another commenter alternately post "buyer beware" and "caveat emptor." Unfortunately, I do not have any funds available for the purchase at the moment. I do however, have a drawing of a spider, that I would like to provide for the purchase price. I think you will find its value will match that which you place on the Consumerist.

Kind regards,

P. Punko, Esq.
blog.3bulls.net

Another interested party named Michael is so busy producing money that he has no time for commas and that is why you can read his email which we have reprinted below very fast:

Dear consumerist,

After reading about the man who tired to pay his bill with a drawing of a spider I wish to purchase the consumerist with this drawing of a caterpillar which I value at about 62 million dollars should you accept my offer I promise to make drawings for all the employees daily which would range from stick figures to various animals and plants as you can tell I am quite the artist.

Regards,
Michael

Matt writes:

I have had the most unbelievable experience with Citi Card this week. In a nutshell, an error on their website led me to schedule two full payments and they won't give me the money back. Hopefully this story will prevent some of your readers from experiencing a similar problem.

On July 12, I received my Citi Card statement via email. The bill was $755.34 and was due on August 4. I went to the Citi website and scheduled a full payment to post on August 1. A couple weeks went by, and on August 1, I was getting ready to leave on a business trip, so I decided to check and make sure that the payment was indeed scheduled. I went to my Scheduled Payments page on Citi's website and it told me I had no scheduled payments. I then went to the page with my account status, and it still said I owed $755.34 by August 4. I assumed I either didn't schedule the payment, or I did and something went wrong. Either way, the website told me I had a bill due in three days and no payments scheduled, so I scheduled another payment of $755.34 for August 4.

As you can probably guess by now, on August 4, Citi made a deduction of $755.34 and then on August 5 made another deduction in the same amount. This brought my checking account within $52 of overdrafting, and my family and I were about to take a vacation to a small town where not every store takes credit cards. I called Citi and explained the situation, and they offered to return the money in 7 to 14 days, which was unacceptable. This was Wednesday. My wife and I would be paid on Friday, but we were going to be in a car without access to cash all day Thursday, so we needed the money immediately. They also blamed me completely for the debacle. When I repeatedly explained that I checked the scheduled payments page and was told nothing was scheduled, all they would tell me was that I should have called or emailed. But, why would I call or email, when I assume I can trust their website? Should I call or email every time I schedule a payment to confirm they received it? They then told me to call my bank and claim it as an unauthorized charge. I did so and was told an investigation would take place and I would have the money back in 7 to 10 days. Again, completely unhelpful. I said no thanks.

I called Citi back, argued with a supervisor for half an hour, and got absolutely nowhere. Just the same unbudging runaround. Completely infuriated, I told her to go ahead and put in the refund request, even though it didn't really do me any good.

So now, I get my mail today and find a letter from Citi, again blaming me entirely and telling me that no refund will be issued after all. So, Citi Card has a shitty website and gets to take out a $755 interest-free loan from me without my permission, and the whole stupid thing is my fault. I've dealt with a lot of bad customer service, but never any as sloppy and stubbornly unhelpful as this. I will be closing my Citi Card and would urge all of your readers to do the same.

Matt, we think you should escalate this higher up the Citibank food chain. It's unreasonable that a bank would hold their customer responsible for an error on their part, and it's absurd to think that it takes a bank up to two weeks to electronically re-deposit funds that they removed within a fraction of a second. Check out our Consumer's Guide to Fighting Back for suggestions on how to appeal to (hopefully) more reasonable minds at the executive level, including how to launch an Executive Email Carpet Bomb.

The Internet Explorer developer's forum has developed one solution:

Here is the fix for users of IE 6 and 7 who are getting the "operation aborted" message.

Follow These Steps Exactly:

1. Open Internet Explorer.
2. Click on the menu Tools -> Internet Options.
3. Click on the tab Security.
4. Click on the icon Restricted Sites.
5. Click on the button Sites.
6. Under Add this website to the zone:
   Type the text ‘ *.sitemeter.com ’ (with asterisk and dot & without the quotes).
7. Click the Add button. Click Close. Click OK.

All sites will work again without error messages coming up.

IE users can also bypass the Sitemeter bug by accessing sites through RSS. Here are our feeds:

• Full Content (with ads)
• Partial Content (no ads)
• Comments

• Ben Popken
• Meghann Marco
• Chris Walters
• Jay Slatkin
• Carey Greenberg-Berger

Worst of all, Sitemeter hasn't acknowledged the problem. Patching the bug and pretending this never happened isn't a winning damage control strategy. We don't need a lengthy explanation, but "Whoops, we broke the internet," would be nice.

Web Sites Using SiteMeter Are Crashing with Internet Explorer [Wired]
Re: Internet Explorer cannot open the Internet site - Operation aborted [MSDN Forums]
Firefox [Mozilla]

United's spokesperson Robin Urbanski, says the airline found "between one and three" ticks on the flight, and that she wasn't sure what kind they were or how they got there.

"I don't know if we'll be able to find that out," Urbanski said. "When possible, we do try to look into those type of things, and hopefully try to look for its origin."

No ticks were found on passengers.

Ticks on a plane: insects delay United Airlines flight from Denver to Des Moines [Star Tribune]

From the UPI:

Officials said tests revealed the roach found on the take-out meatlovers pizza was cooked alive with the pie.

Yum! brands, the U.S. operator of the Pizza Hut, lost its license for a month and then reopened with "increased cleaning practices," according to the (Australia) Sunday Mail. The Brisbane Magistrates Court ordered the company to pay a fine of $35,000, and Yum! has said it is sorry for the incident. No word on whether the customer who got the cockroach pizza has stopped screaming yet.

Company fined $35,000 for roach problems [UPI]
(Photo: Adam A. Koch )

On Tuesday, April 15, 2008 a Time Warner representative came to our home to install the digital telephone modem which would also provide our internet service.
 
My husband observed an insect walking on the modem box and asked what it was and the employee seemed dazed and confused.

After the installer left, my husband and I saw cockroach after cockroach emerge from the modem. We killed them as quickly as we could. We have never seen roaches in our house before. Our house is free-standing and many yards away from neighbor homes.
 
I called Time Warner insisting that they come to remove the modem. The woman I spoke with insisted that I had to be wrong and that it was impossible for cockroaches to be in the modem. She refused my request that Time Warner come on the following day to remove and replace the offending modem, which housed a swarm of roaches.
 
We wrapped the modem up in plastic and duct tape.
 
On Saturday, April 19, 2008 when the representative came to replace the modem, we had arranged for a witness to be with us. We took the modem to the front porch, removed the plastic bag, and a number of cockroach bodies fell out. The Time Warner worker agreed that modems sometimes came from other people's homes and were reused. He suggested that the modem may have first been used in a contaminated home or that it was possible that the first installer may have had cockroaches in his truck.
 
In the meantime, cockroaches of all sizes and ages are in our study. We try to kill them as we can. We would not have had this infestation were it not for the Time Warner modem.
 
Yours sincerely, Natalie Columbus, OH

I just started reading The Consumerist. I did a search on bedbugs to see if you had any posts, and then thought I'd tell you my own story after reading about the people who found bedbugs in a Santa Monica hotel. In August of last year, I stayed at the Holiday Inn in Santa Monica.

The last night of my stay, I woke up about 2am, got up for a minute, but when I went back to bed, I saw a small bug crawling on my bed. Then I looked at the other bed, and saw another tiny brown bug. Grabbed kleenex, tossed them in the toilet, but every time I walked back to the beds, there were more of them. Most were tiny and brown, a couple of them were larger and a dark black/brown. Didn't know what they were, but I called down and asked the front desk to move me to a different room. Was creeped out, but didn't think anything of it until three mornings after I returned home, I woke up covered in bites. Did some research, and figured out that they were bedbug bites (three bites in a row, that swelled up and were very itchy). The pictures I found matched the bugs I saw on the bed in the hotel room. I had to go back to that hotel the following week (for work, the company booked the room) and I told them that I had found bugs in my home which matched the bugs I found in their hotel. Got a gee, that's too bad response.

Once I confirmed with an exterminator that I did have bedbugs, I called the hotel again. Got another gee, that's too bad response, but they did refund the cost of the stay (about $950). Over the next month and a half ( the time it took to get the exterminator to my apartment and then get the treatment) I spent about $5000 on dry cleaning, storage supplies, the exterminator, and moving out of my apartment during the two-week treatment. I called the hotel again, and asked them to cover those costs. Since then, I've been given the run around, ignored by the hotel manager, passed off to corporate who said gee, that's too bad but it's up to the hotel, and finally given over to a risk management/insurance firm for InterContinental Hotels. This firm has called me a liar, said that I didn't have proof of bedbugs being in my apartment because even though I found them in my apartment and the exterminator confirmed what they were and treated, the exterminator never wrote down specifically that they found bedbugs, that because I didn't go to the doctor and have the doctor confirm that the bites were from bedbugs that I had no proof that they were indeed bedbug bites, and now will not return phone calls. They say that the hotel exterminator checked all the rooms and found no evidence of bedbugs, even though the hotel told me that their exterminator wasn't looking only for bedbugs, just does a bi-weekly sweep for general problems and didn't find anything.

I'm staying after them, but the worst thing I can wish on them is not that I go to court, sue them and they lose - it's that the hotel management and the people from this risk management company all bring home bed bugs and have to go through the sheer hell that is getting rid of them.

Regards,
Sarah

Here's some advice for travelers from Harvard University (PDF):

During travel, before you check into a hotel, check into the mattress. Carefully remove the sheets and examine the head section of the bed, look at the seams of the mattress as well as both sides of the head board. If you see any small insects in either of these locations, they are probably bed bugs.

Bringing your favorite pillow along on your travels may increase the chances of this pillow becoming infested with bed bugs and the transport of these bed bugs back to your home. If you have a favorite pillow, make sure it is encased in a bed bug proof sealed pillow case.

Remember not to place your luggage next to the bed. Find a location as far from the head of the bed as possible, and store your luggage in this location. This same principal applies to portable radios and other items that could conceal bed bugs.

If you do see bed bugs or think you have been bitten by bed bugs during your travel, it is extremely important to report this incident to the hotel management or else other unsuspecting individuals may meet the same fate.

Any readers been through what Sarah is going through? Advice?

(Photo:Getty)

"Restaurant gives 25 percent discount for bugs" [Reuters]
(Illustration: Getty)

"The circuit was tied to the organization's core network," Pasdar stated in the affidavit. "It had access to the billing system, text messaging, fraud detection, Web site, and pretty much all the systems in the data center without restrictions."

House Commerce Committee leaders said Pasdar's allegations echo those previously made by Mark Klein, a retired AT&T technician, in the Electronic Frontier Foundation's lawsuit against AT&T Inc. More than three dozen lawsuits have been filed against top telecom firms, including parent companies of national mobile-phone operators AT&T Mobility and Verizon Wireless.

"When you put Mr. Pasdar's information together with that of AT&T whistleblower Mark Klein, there is troubling evidence of telecom misconduct in massive domestic surveillance of ordinary Americans," said Cindy Cohn, legal director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. "Congress needs to have hearings and get some answers about whether American telecommunications companies are helping the government to illegally spy on millions of us. Retroactive immunity for telecom companies now ought to be off the table in the ongoing FISA [Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act] debate."

"Whistleblower links wireless carrier to warrantless wiretaps" [RCRWireless News]
(Photo: Getty)

I bought a Health Valley split pea soup at Publix Supermarket in Miami, FL on Friday 01/11/08 in the morning before coming in to work. Around 12:30 or so when I finally felt ready to have lunch, I opened the soup only to find it infested with dead bugs.

There was actually one live one still crawling around in there but by the time I found my camera to take a picture it had escaped. All the brown things are actually dead bugs. People should be aware of these types of dry soups. Such a disappointment...not to mention that these soups cost around $4.00.

Some businesses, however, aren't so easily mollified.

Three businesses that lost data during the update snafu have filed a lawsuit against Intuit and have asked a federal judge to grant the case class-action status. The firms — Create-A-Card Inc. in New York, AGSJ Inc. in California and Philanthropic Focus LLC in Florida — charged Intuit with reacting slowly to news from users of the buggy update and said that they each had lost irreplaceable data.

[Re. "no buggy updates": At least not on the user side—we know that doesn't guarantee anything...]

Here is the text from a test chat The Register engaged in, after finding out from a distraught reader that RoboSanta was being inappropriate to his nieces:

El Reg says: Eat it
Santa says: You want me to eat what?!? It's fun to talk about oral sex, but I want to chat about something else...
El Reg says: You dirty bastard!
Santa says: I think you're dirty bastard.

"Microsoft's sex-obsessed RoboSanta spouts filth at children" [The Register] (Thanks to japacooney!)
(Photo: Getty)

First, at risk of stating the obvious, fending off mosquitos needn't require money. So before heading to the store, here are a few no-brainers:

• Remove any standing water around your place. Gutters, bird baths, and pots are breeding grounds for critters.
• Avoid wearing bright colors and fragrances, lest you be confused with vegetation. I've also read that you should avoid dark colors as well, but I'm not sure where that leaves you.
• The worst times of day for bites are dusk and dawn. The second worst time: the period inbetween. So take precautions when you're outside then, particularly when the weather is hot or humid.

Inside: Bug repellent, clothing, and Skeeter Bag!

Ready to spend money? When you're in serious mosquito hell, you'll want to resort to bug repellent. If so, DEET is generally the most effective, and is relatively safe, so look for products containing it.

For kids and hippies, Slate found Repel Lemon Eucalyptus Spray to be the most effective alternative. Unlike chemical repellents, Eucalyptus Spray needs to be applied every hour — and it's fairly smelly — so you know it's natural.

CLOTHING

If you want to avoid insecticides, protective clothing is your best option: wear loose-fitting, tightly woven material with (duh) long sleeves and pants.

Unfortunately, covering up also tends to be uncomfortably hot, so I investigated options to avoid the heat factor. I wrote a few companies and asked them to send samples of summer shirts that could help deter bites. The snobs at Patagonia turned me down, but I heard from a couple of others.

The North Face vaporwick long-sleeve tee ($34) is like magic: cool and crazy comfortable. On the downside, it made me look like a Star Trek crew member.... or like someone aspiring to athleticism, but not quite making it. I also hate having a logo — any logo — on my chest. I'd wear this out walking, jogging, or watering the plants, but not to an outdoor picnic.

Exofficio has a line called Buzz Off specifically designed to repel mosquitos. I tried a simple long-sleeve tee ($34) and a collared button-down, Baja ($85). Both were cool and comfortable, though not magic. The Buzz Off line contains Permethrin, an insect repellent that'll last though 25 washes; unfortunately, it requires that you launder the stuff separately. And, oh yeah, it's highly toxic to cats. So if you want to fend off cats as well as bugs, this is your product.

SKEETER BAG!

I bought a Skeeterbag for $11, cos it's so beautifully lo-tech - a much cheaper and smarter option than fancy mosquito magnets or vacuums. You just attach this net to a large box fan, place in near a spot that you want bugless, and you're set. Mosquitos get sucked into the net from the back of the fan and can't get out as long as the fan's on. Pros: Bugs don't like fans on them. Cons: people don't either. Propping up a box fan next to your patio table kind of zaps the ambiance. And it only helps in a small area. Really, this is only workable if your next door neighbors are breeding mosquito colonies, or if your home has several horses and dogs. (It was invented by a guy who raises both.)

LAST BUT NOT LEAST

• Citronella candles work, but they're best in confined spaces when there's not a lot of wind. The scent covers up the smell of your breath, which mosquitos are attracted to. Make sure to buy candles that have glass or other containers shielding them from wind; many candles don't, rendering them all but useless in the real world.

• Considering replacing outdoor lighting with yellow "bug" lights, which attract fewer bugs. (Yellow lights are not repellent, though.) — CARRIE MCLAREN

He's researching getting his home treated as a preventitive measure against the wood gobblers and has found several complaints against both companies.

Any thoughts, good or bad, especially in reference to their termite plans?

Having a house with no wood touching the ground is a good way to go. Even still, termites can traverse these with mud tunnels!

Here's a short primer on identifying if you have termite infestation.

Although it's a pretty good sign "Yes" if your house looks like this.