Royce Eddington

Here’s something I found out the hard way.

If you use Bento for Mac and iPhone, deleting a database on the iPhone will also delete the master database on the Mac on the next sync.

Let me type that again, because I still can’t believe it.

If you delete a Bento database on the iPhone, on the next sync, the master database on the Mac, the one with all the critical information you’ve been building up, will be completely erased.

No warning. No confirmation. No temp file hiding in the library. Nothing in the trash to recover. The database is gone. Wiped out. Nuked from orbit. Buh-bye.

Deleting a master database from a field device should take confirmation, a second password confirmation, re-re-confirmation, and the last two addresses you’ve lived at. For a database program to allow an immediate nuke without any prompt? That’s beyond unacceptable.

Filemaker knows about this issue (here and here), but their response has always been “ah, just restore from weekly backup”.

Ah, no. Hell no. This is a crippling “should have never got out of beta” design flaw.

Zero-star rating for Bento. Don’t ever use this app.

You know those self-serve “cappuccino” machines that vend all different kinds of flavored coffees? The ones that look like this…

I saw one that was left open yesterday. While I wasn’t expecting a barista on duty, I wasn’t expecting to see this either…

It’s all powdered mix.

The powdered mix is apparently measured out and sprinkled over a hot water tube and, at least at this location, dispensed through never-cleaned spigots.

Yummy!

Oh, and that spinning whirring noise when you press the button before the “coffee” flows? It’s not a coffee bean grinder revving up – it is just a special effect to sell the product.

I don’t know why I had assumed there were actual coffee beans somewhere in those devices. From now on, I’m sticking to the real stuff.

Saying I have a “thing” for cigars is like saying Cookie Monster has a “slight predisposition” to cookies. I love cigars. Loooove cigars. To paraphrase Will Rogers, I never met a cigar I didn’t like.

Unfortunately, the local specialty “cigar shop” is full of overpriced, mold covered, dried out, busted drek. Literally. Check out these photos…

 

 

 

Blasphemy! Sacrilege! It should be illegal to beat down cigars like this, I tell you.

Since I have no local shop to rely on, I’ve been buying everything online at either at cigar.com or cigarsinternational.com.

I haven’t had any kind of problem whatsoever with either website. Both have outstanding customer service, both have great everyday and sale prices, and both deliver their shipments a day or two earlier than promised. Both have great weekly deals, and between the two of them, I can get just about any cigar I’m craving.

I will always go with cigar.com first, though. No contest.

With absolutely everything else being identical, here’s why cigar.com is the king…

 

 

Every shipment from cigar.com, regardless of the cigar’s retail price, has a HumiCare pillow in every thick-walled heavy-duty ziploc.

A HumiCare pillow is like a mini-humidifier. It has hundreds of little beads inside that absorb distilled water and regulate the humidity in small enclosures for a brief time. You can reuse those little pouches as many times as you want by just opening the HumiCare pouch, dipping the inner “pillow” in distilled water for a few seconds, letting any extra water drip off, and putting it back inside the HumiCare pouch again and again and again.

A little portable pouch is no replacement for a real humidor, but when I open that outer ziploc from a new cigar.com shipment, the cigars smell fresh with a capital F. The temptation to not smoke one right there and then? Almost impossible to deny.

All because of that little well saturated HumiCare pillow.

Cigarsinternational.com shipping?

 

 

A wafer thin plastic baggie with no HumiCare or humidification packet at all.

If UPS or FedEx delivers a cigarsinternational.com shipment at the end of a typical south Texas summer day, I usually smell cardboard packaging looooong before I smell the cigars. Sometimes the ziplocs pop open inside the UPS box, too, and I find loose cigars all over the shipping box.

Don’t get me wrong. The quality of the cigars from both companies are outstanding. Give a Liga, Ave Maria or a Cohiba from either company after a weeklong dip in my humidor, and I couldn’t tell you which one came from where.

Can cigar.com save some time and money by not including a “prepped” HumiCare packet with every shipment? Definitely. But knowing my cigars, regardless of price range, will always arrive fresh and in good condition? That’s worth the “first view” when I go shopping every single time.

Suddenly I have a craving for a cigar…

A few months ago, I heard about a project called Cerealize. They were the winners of the StartupBus competition at SXSW with the blisteringly brilliant idea of letting you “mix custom breakfast cereal from your favorite ingredients” online!

 

 

My first reaction? Something along the lines of “Oooooooo yeah!”

One day while browsing the ‘net, I saw Cerealize was accepting the first 100 people that sent in a reply to try out their website and get a taste of their product before it went “live” for the rest of the world. I quickly fired off an email and found out I was lucky number 10 of 100! Booya!

Once I got the secret credentials to login for ordering, I went to their website and saw this exquisite menu to choose from…

THE BASE INGREDIENTS

• Puffed Quinoa
• Corn Flakes
• Mini Cookies
• Honey Roasted Oates
• Whole Grain Os

THE EXTRAS

• Almonds
• Cocoa Nibs
• Shredded Coconut
• Hazelnuts
• Cashews
• Chia Seeds
• Flax Seeds
• Hemp Seeds
• Pumpkin Seeds
• Sunflower Seeds
• Goji Berry
• Blueberry
• Mango
• Strawberry
• Bananas
• Brown Sugar
• Cayenne Pepper
• Cinnamon
• Cocoa Powder
• Honey
• Chocolate Covered Espresso Beans
• Marshmallows
• Bacon
• Yogurt-Covered Raisins
• Peeps

 

Mix and match? Any and all items? No limits?

The 8 year old in me was completely freaking out.

• Peeps and Marshmallows on a base of Honey Roasted Oates!
• Bacon and Brown Sugar on a base of Whole Grain Os!
• Cocoa Nibs, Cocoa Powder, Chocolate Covered Espresso Beans and Shredded Coconut on a base of Corn Flakes!

Heaven.

I finally decided on something simple. Corn Flakes, Brown Sugar, Honey, Whole Grain O’s, Mini Cookies, Honey Roasted Oates and Bananas.

I finalized my personal magical concoction, and went straight to the PLACE ORDER page when I saw something that stopped me cold.

Any order and any combination would be $10.

$10? For a box of cereal? Dude! There better be something else in that box aside from whole grain goodness!

After my inner “Scrooge McDuck” quit WAAAAH WAAH WAH-ing and calmed down, I rationalized the cost wasn’t really that bad, and if I wanted new companies like this to succeed, I needed to invest.

Head in the clouds, and hoping for the best, I placed the order.

A few weeks passed, (with the occasional hard twitch when I thought about how much that ONE BOX OF CEREAL cost), but I finally received the box from Cerealize!

 

 

It was a bit smaller than I expected, but I was thrilled to see that it actually arrived and it was full of the breakfast goodness that I had created!

 

 

On the outside of the box was my number, immortalized in sharpie for all of cardboard time. #10 of #100!

 

 

When I opened the box to pull the bag out, I heard a clink at the bottom.

 

 

A plastic spoon? That’s kind of charming, I thought. But then I looked at the bag of happy bliss I had summoned from the vapors of the internet itself, and I immediately noticed…

 

 

…no bananas.

No bananas. None. Not a single Bah. Not a single Nana.

You would think one of the very top things of the to-do list when letting customers make their own $10 cereal is to get the ingredients right on their order. Forget about putting a half cent plastic spoon in the box! The customers are ordering custom-made cereal! Online! They probably already own a spoon-like food delivery tool of their very own! Job number one should have been “Did the contents of the bag match the order?”.

Inside the box was also a congratulatory letter addressed to me, saying how wonderful Cerealize is, yadda yadda yadda, and by the way, here’s a copy of the list of the ingredients you ordered. Ingredients that, you know, should have been in the cereal.

Aaand it gets worse.

I opened the bag and poured the cereal into a bowl. The contents didn’t look bad, but it didn’t look great either. Let me rephrase that… they didn’t look $10 kind of great.

 

 

You know those cereals that come in a big giant plastic bag at the supermarket? The ones waaaay at the end of the cereal isle with names like FROSTED FLAYKES and CHEERY-OHS? Those $1 cereals looked way better than what I saw in the bowl.

So the big question… the question that could make a bronze contender into a gold medal top-shelf grand poo-bah winner in the last few seconds of the home stretch… What did the cereal taste like?!

Nothing.

 

 

I poured in the milk and took a giant spoonful. It all tasted the same. Like nothing. The cookies didn’t say COOOOKIE. The Corn Flakes didn’t CRUNCH and say HEY THERE, MAC, HOWS YOUR MORNING? The bowl was uninspired. Everything blurred together. The cereal was, for lack of a better word, bland.

Not flat. Not tasty. Not terrible. Not stale. Just terribly bland.

The closest thing I can come up with to describe this cereal is if someone went back in time to a whole foods store from the early 80′s. Back when they didn’t know healthy food could have a taste, or that healthy food could taste like anything for that matter! It’s almost as if they put a baggie under every one of those old-fashioned floor-to-ceiling tubes of 80′s health-food cereals and went POOT POOT POOT down the line to fill a bag. Sure, everything looks different, but it all tastes the same.

When you mention “whole grain Os” to a cereal junkie, they’re going to expect Cheerios. When you mention “Mini Cookies”, to a cereal junkie they’re going to expect Cookie Crisp. When you mention “Corn Flakes ” to a cereal junkie, they’re going to expect Frosted Flakes. When you charge $10 to a cereal junkie, they’re going to expect something better than if they went out and bought three boxes of cereal at $3 each and poured them all together into a bowl themselves!

Right now on their ABOUT page, Cerealize says it “was born as a side project and we haven’t yet built cereal-production capabilities. We’re flattered by all the interest we’ve been getting, though. If there is enough market demand we might turn this into a business.”

Cerealize, if you’re reading, I wanted to believe. Really. This was a brilliant idea, guys. Brilliant! I can totally see Jerry Seinfeld being your spokesperson and the concept of Cerealize making the existing cereal juggernauts of the world have a righteous freak out. But man, this thing fell out of the sky and hit every branch of the ugly tree on the way down!

Make the ingredients tastier!

Make the boxes cheaper!

And don’t screw up the customer’s order!

Get those things right, Cerealize, and come again.

I’ve been watching HBO’s Game of Thrones and noticed every show intro has the same etchings on the sun-compass thing that spins by. I finally paused the show long enough to take some screenshots and see what they are.

The first one is a dragon burning a few different cities.

 

 

 

Kind of ominous.

A few frames later shows the dragon being attacked by a Lion, a Wolf, and a Stag at the same time from different directions.

 

 

The last clear image of the sun-compass thing has the Stag holding its’ head high with a halo-like ring around its’ head. All the other animals are bowing down to it. I see a boar, a lion, a pair of geese, a dog-like creature, and some kind of horse in the far right. But no wolf.

 

 

 

So did I just stumble across the prophesy for the next four seasons?

 

UPDATE: A comment by Gabriel (below) says it is just “the story leading up to the first season of Game of Thrones”. I probably should read the books and pay more attention to the first season of the show.

I’ve found a surprisingly easy way to tell if an app from iTunes for the iPhone or iPad is going to take too much time to play and won’t be any fun. Just check out the “Top In-App Purchases” levels. If the top tier is over $10, you’re not going to enjoy playing that game if you have a full-time 8 AM to 5 PM kind of job.

Take, for example, EA’s latest offering… Road Trippin’!

Looking at the app listing in iTunes, everything seems all Smurfy-Happy-Blue on top.

 

 

But if you look off to the left column, under the FREE APP button (or DOWNLOAD button if you’ve already grabbed the app before), there’s a section called “Top In-App Purchases”.

So looking at Road Trippin’s! top offering, I see to play the game with “everything”, I would need to spend…

 

 

..$99.99!

$99 dollars and 99 cents. Almost half the price of a console system! Just so I can play with “everything” this “free” game offers.

You don’t have to be in iTunes to see this. You can also find this info under the iPhone and iPad section of the game app by clicking on the “Top In-App Purchases” banner….

 

 

…where you will see the same $99.99 foolishness.

 

 

“In-App Purchases” are just things you can buy while playing the game to move along faster, or just get those missing “propeller-for-the-damn-airplane” kinds of parts and those oh-so special “air-strike to get that pickle-faced rat bastich sniper that’s been nailing me for the last three days” kinds of options.

Do you need to make in-app purchases? No. You can slog through the game, playing hours and hours and hours and hours on end just to nickel and dime your way to nirvana. No more “sneaking-a-game-on-the-freeway”. No more hanging up on someone just because a pop-up from the game appeared.

But, in my experience, playing games like this take months to “win”.

The wheeeeeee-fun part ends around day 12. The Spirit of Piss, Vinegar and Vengeance kicks in around day 21.

The more iOS games I play like this, the more I realize most of the “In-App Purchase” games are basing themselves on the good old Las Vegas slot machine business model.

1. Put some money in the system.
2. Push some buttons.
3. Watch the beep-boop flashing lights.
4. Your money is gone!
5. Repeat Step One.

When a game company has priced the top-tier of their In-App Purchases insanely high, in my opinion, they’ve made the game overly hard and time consuming on purpose to get you hooked and make a grab for your money.

I’ll stick to the games without the in-app purchases banner. If a game does have in-app purchases, I’ll only install it on my device if the top tier is $10 or less (or to unlock the full-version of the game).

Like the old Vegas motto says… the easiest way to win these $100 games is not to play ‘em.

So long story short, my gorgeous wife and I have been adopted by two cats. They’re charming and pretty as any of those storybook kitties, and we really are quite fond of them. The problem is that they’re brothers. Most of the time, they’re fine together. Peas in a Pod. Steak and Potatoes. Dairy and Queen. You get the idea.

But then, every so often, there’s a massive tremor in the force, and you can practically hear the “LEEEEEEETS GET READY TO RUUUUMMMBBLLLEEEEE” announcement.

The fight is ON, and they go At. It. Hard.

The dogs said to just kick both of their asses over the fence and be done with it, but I decided to look at a pet store and see if there was anything that could calm them down when they’re together.

 

Looking in the “holy crap how much is this?!?” isle of the pet store, I found this little green bottle. “Calm Down. Calms nerves and stressed cats.” it said right on the front. Sounds good, I thought!

 

 

So I flipped the bottle around to see what the magic ingredients were. Let’s see… Llex de Luthor… no, wait, it says in English off to the side “English Holly”. No idea. “Impatiens”. No idea. “Rock Rose”. No idea. “Star of Bethlehem”. That’s a med? Freaky. Aaaaannnd finally…..

 

 

Sweet Baby Buddha! Alcohol?!? 13% ALCOHOL?!?

Oh yeah! This is just effin’ PERFECT! Give the fighting cats some hooch! Slamming liquor always makes people calm down and talk out their problems!

Here’s what I see going down : Mr. Tinkles* puts the pimpalicious “where-my-money-at?” smack down on his brother when he’s drunk on this stuff. Eventually, he becomes a category 4P cat : Pickled, Purring, Pissy, and Punchy! Before he knows it, he’s on his back most of the day and night, giving full belly rubs to complete strangers for money to buy hooch! One day, the bitter irony of chugging MAD DOG 20/20 finally hits him like a ton of kitty litter. The formerly happy housecat finally joins the local chapter of HAAACK. (Hairball And Alcoholics Anonymous’ Cat Kingdom).

“Hello. I’m Mr. Tinkles.* And I’m an alcoholic.”

Sad times, indeed.

Plus, that little bottle was something like $20. (That’s probably the main reason I put it back come to think of it.) After all, a bottle of Jack is still around $15, right? I gotta save money where I can in this economy!

—

* NOTE : My cat’s name is NOT “Mr. Tinkles”. Just wanted to point that out for the record.

** NOTE #2 : No, I’m not going to give any of our cats Jack Daniels. That’s still too expensive. I just wanted to point that out for the record as well.

There was a major protest event in New York city earlier today. Thousands of protesters who want to “Occupy Wall Street” took over a large swath of the financial district, and then marched on the Brooklyn bridge, completely shutting it down. While the protesters were on the bridge, some were cordoned off by the NYPD and over 700 protesters (as of this post) were arrested.

There was NO mainstream media coverage of this event. There was absolutely no interruption of the pre-programmed Saturday night drivel on CNN, FOX, ABC, CBS, or NBC for a live news feed.

Twitter was also not trending the thousands of #occupywallstreet and #ows tags.

Yes, there were tweets from individuals on what was happening, but unless you followed certain feeds, or knew of the hashtags to search for, you would never know this event happened.

The protest isn’t what really concerns me. It’s the defining silence around it that has me wondering if something very important has been broken in our society.

Day-old news doesn’t carry the same impact as “live” news. Blogs and individual tweets still don’t reach the same number of people that a TV broadcast does. So is there such a thing as reliable mass media anymore? Is there a way to show what is happening in the world that can’t be censored or prejudiced with an individual’s point of view? And did Twitter censor the thousands and thousands of #occupywallstreet and #ows hashtags?

A good friend of mine tweeted me that nobody will care unless “someone important like Brad Pitt, Snookie or a Kardashian to be named later appears”. Maybe that’s the biggest problem.

I have an upcoming project where I need to securely stream videos to multiple iOS devices for a training seminar, so I decided to give the Seagate GoFlex Satellite a try yesterday to see if it would do what I needed.

I should have known things were going to go bad just looking at the box.

 

Somebody in Seagate’s art department needs to hold an iPad someday. This is ridiculous. A five year old can see this picture is wrong.

 

 

I should have known this was going to be the start of something…. terrible. Something that would eat two hours of my day just to get set up and running.

 

 

Right up front, I found out this fugness is NOT plug and play. The Seagate GoFlex Satellite is about as friendly as a crackhead rattlesnake on a burning cactus.

Once you take the Seagate GoFlex Satellite out of the box, you’re going to have to do some work before your iPad can see it (let alone use it).

I’ll skip over the 55 minutes of trying to get this thing installed and researching Seagate’s online tech support and just list what I had to do…

1. Charge the Seagate GoFlex Satellite for 30 minutes into a wall outlet using the plugs they provide.
2. While it is charging, go to Seagate’s download page and get your sync software for your platform (mac or PC) and install it on your desktop.
3. On the iPad, while it is connected to a live WiFi network, download GoFlex Media (by seagate) AND 8player Lite in the iOS store. Install both of these apps on the iPad.
4. After 30 minutes of charging, unplug the usb cable from the back of the Seagate drive
5. Press the RESET button on the bottom of the device with a tack or pin for 5 seconds to clear out the factory garbage on it
6. TURN OFF EVERYTHING IN THE AREA THAT AUTOMATICALLY CONNECTS TO WIFI NETWORKS. Not kidding. If anything auto connects to the Seagate during the next steps, the drive’s WiFi will never blink blue and update.
7. Turn off the WiFi on the iPad (by going to GENERAL and WiFi)
8. Connect the Seagate GoFlex Satellite drive to a PC – not a mac.
9. Download the latest firmware update for the Seagate GoFlex Satellite from Seagate’s website
10. Save the update directly to the root level of the GoFlex drive
11. Safely eject the drive from the taskbar of your PC. (You can’t just unplug this thing straight. It may lose the update.)
12. Hold down the power button on the side of the Seagate GoFlex Satellite for 15 seconds to turn it off.
13. Wait 15 more seconds.
14. Press the power button to re-boot the drive
15. The power light on the drive will blink green and then go solid. Then the light under the WiFi will start blinking green… then stay solid green…. then blink again.
16. After two minutes of this green blinkage, the wifi light will blink blue very briefly. This is where you MUST connect through WiFi on your iPad. (Miss this opportunity at your own risk!)
17. While the GoFlex is blinking blue, on the iPad, go to GENERAL and WIFI.
18. Turn the WiFi back on the iPad
19. Under CHOOSE A NETWORK, pick SEAGATE GO FLEX WIFI
20. Once the checkmark appears next to the SEAGATE GO FLEX WIFI network and the WiFi icon appears by the iPads’ name on the top menubar, go to the GoFlex Media app on the iPad and launch it.

Nothing to it!!

Once you have cleared the hurdles of connecting this device, these are the screens you will see in the GoFlex Media app on the iPad…

This is what you will have to deal with. It’s not like having a external flash drive or a folder you can just tap-open stuff with. It’s definitely not a Mac-like app. What you see above is what you get.

Once you’re connected to the drive on the iPad, you can change the name of the drive as it shows up in WiFi as well as assign a password. That’s about it, though.

To get files on the drive, you will have to use that sync app that was downloaded to the desktop and connect the Seagate GoFlex Satellite directly to your mac (or PC). When you use the transfer app, whatever files Seagate’s app does not support will not get copied over. If you drag and drop files, the files will copy over, but the Seagate app will not list them in the VIDEO or PHOTO views. Also, if you try and drag-and-drop files directly to the drive, some files may not transfer depending on how your computer is set up for external NTFS disk write access.

You can download files from the GoFlex Satellite drive to the iPad in the app, but you can not send any files from the iPad to the drive. It’s strictly a one way street.

Also, Seagate’s GoFlex app also does not support .flv videos (among a few other formats).

Oh, and the drive is formatted NTFS. If you re-format it into any other type, it won’t work anymore. It’s NTFS or nothing.

Right. So back to the other app that was downloaded to the iPad – 8player Lite.

The reason 8player Lite was downloaded to the iPad is because Seagate’s own technical support staff recommends using this app instead of Seagates’ GoFlex Media app!! Not kidding. The techs’ comments in their own forums and on amazon.com constantly mention this app instead of their own.

It’s pretty obvious why. Launching 8player Lite will get you to a old-style PSP navigation system…

Click what you want and the icons appear under to list content, or to the right for hierarchy. To back up a level, just click to the left.

It’s exactly as I remember my PSP system’s navigation.

 

The best part is that this app will list everything you dragged and dropped. Everything.

This is really handy to see what you really have on the drive in a category pane, and I believe it’s how a file-management app should behave.

But what really sold me on the 8player Lite app was this…

 

It played .flv’s. This little app actually played everything I had… every format, every size, every medium.

That’s a pretty sad state of design when I would rather have an old PSP interface than the one Seagate designed in 2011 for an iPad.

OK, now for the bad part… you can’t get online while you’re using this thing. The ipad is only connected to the Seagate GoFlex Satellite through WiFi, and if you try to get anywhere in Safari, you will just wind up at a web-interface of the files you have on the GoFlex Satellite drive. To get back online, you have to break the WiFi connection and switch back to your original network in the iPad’s GENERAL and NETWORK settings.

(You can also just switch off the Seagate GoFlex Satellite drive with the power button on the side, but your iPad may or may not reconnect to the previous wireless network as quickly as you could do so manually.)

Let me tell you, no internet access gets old real fast.

So to sum up my complaints…

1. This monstrosity is NOT plug and play out of the box! Connecting a WiFi drive should require no more than 5 minutes.
2. NTFS only is a poor decision considering most iPad users are also mac users as well.
3. There has got to be a way to surf the internet while the drive is connected. Maybe make this drive an FTP server that can get a DHCP address from a wireless network and let the iPad app act as a GUI FTP login? Or let the drive login to the network as a alternate configuration. (EX: if network named “X” is detected, then set IP address to “Y” and login with “Z” credentials.)
4. A Mac-like GUI. Something for the iPad shouldn’t look like something from the Napster-lovin’-90s.
5. There is no SEND TO DEVICE option. A storage drive that you must to connect to a desktop or laptop to load files to it is just ridiculous.
6. There is no on the fly converting. Seagate needs to take a look at AirVideoFree on the app store to get an idea on how it’s supposed to be done.
7. There are two green lights on this thing. The problem is one of these lights only turns blue and flickers when data is streaming or you have a window of opportunity to connect to the drive. IMO, this light should REMAIN SOLID BLUE when ANY device is connected and revert to green when NO ONE is connected. Ideally, it should also blink blue for every number of users connected and flicker blue when data is being transferred.
8. User/password combos would be great.
9. The getting started video is on the drive, and you can only see it after you have connected! This video needs to be put on the root level of the drive (or in a big TRAINING folder) so people can view it when they need it!
10. No love for .FLV.

Right now, bottom line, the Seagate GoFlex Satellite stinks on ice. But the potential for this drive is enormous.

I think of this drive like one of those fantastic big-budget sounding movies, with characters you’ve always wanted to see on the big screen. But what got made was something with C and D-list actors and director who doesn’t know anything about the project or material they are working on. Just bad all around.

Once the damn thing is connected to the iPad the first time, it behaves. Somewhat. But would I recommend a Seagate GoFlex satellite right now? No. Absolutely not. It’s actually easier to “cloud” data than use this device as it is now.

It needs work to be iPad friendly, and it needs a complete overhaul to be actually useful.

If the software updates make major improvements, I’ll re-review the drive.

UPDATE : If anybody from Seagate reads this post, let me strongly suggest you call Verizon and Sprint. Team up with them to make a 4G WiFi server. Their WiFi hotspot devices (like the Verizon 4G LTE MiFi) and your drive tech. Think mobile 4g hotspot, storage, streaming and internet access. All on one local device, no cloud needed. You will not be able to make these things fast enough at the factory.

Today I learned something interesting.

As part of my job, I get to periodically read the Wolters Kluwer Law & Business’ Workplace Guide to EPA and OSHA.

Oh yeah. It’s exactly as fun as it sounds.

Anyhow, something on page 17, first paragraph got my attention…

“The EPA prohibits the sale of Freon to anyone other than a certified technician. The EPA is in the process of developing a similar restriction for HFC-134a, although none currently exists.”

In other words, the EPA wants to ban WalMart, Target, Pep Boys, Auto Zone and every other car-accessory place from selling those A/C recharge units.

Granted, a lot of people don’t even know or care where the automotive section is at the stores, but if the EPA gets this idea through, getting the gas to repair, seal or recharge an A/C unit won’t be possible unless you’re a “certified technician”.

Scam much?

Those recharge units usually sell out during the summer months, and HFC-134a is supposed to be 100% safe for the environment too. This regulation is either a power grab by the EPA, or worse, HFC-134a isn’t environmentally friendly as first thought and the EPA wants to quietly pull it off the market.

Either way, it’s going to be up to WalMart, Target, Pep Boys, Auto Zone and every other car-accessory place need to fight this and get to the “why”.

And for the record, I’ve used those HFC-134a rechargers on my car, and they do work.