Finally took advantage of the Netflix trial this week. Watched Fast and Furious (the 2009 version), Paul Blart: Mall Cop and Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs.

Netflix has really got the DVD mail rental business down to a science i.e. with the strategically placed bar codes, the original DVD envelopes that double up as return envelopes and was pleasantly surprised at how fast they process returns and sent a new movie DVD back to you (two days). I wonder what happens if one gets lost in the mail or stolen, how will the company know whether the customer isn’t trying to pull a fast one.

I really enjoyed Paul Blart and Cloudy, both were hilarious and Cloudy was so very cute (may be one of the better ones this past couple of years besides Avatar of course). F&F was really bad and it seemed like they were just living on the franchise name, trying to get the movie finished and released fast and didn’t really put the script together well (I couldn’t wait for it to finish).

I’ve got a two week trial and I’m trying to see how many movies I can watch in that time period. Received another three today – District 9, Forgetting Sarah Marshall and Ghost of Girlfriends Past. Should be pretty decent movies. The rate I’m going, I’ll probably watch 12 movies by the end of the trial and shatter my previous record of three movies in a month.

We’ve been getting a bunch of product offers, invitations to educational classes and baby show schedules since we put ourselves on mailing list (at our hospital).

One invitation in particular caught our eye, it was a two day baby show about an hour and a half from where we live. Thinking it was not a bad drive away, we decided to see what this was all about. We were enticed with the offer of a $129 worth of special gifts and safety educational tips.

To our surprise, this so called show happened to be a sales pitch from a company i.e. Babee Tenda and their safety convertible crib and feeding table. The two hours *show* was more of a sit down seminar and the $129 worth of special gifts turned out to be a safety DVD and JC Penney photos discount tickets.

The sales guy was a great presenter, pointing out recalls of competing brands, highlighting stories of baby fatalities, and then showing off advantages of the Babee Tenda crib with a hands on demonstration. He also did a good comparative price analysis of other competitor products and how much we could save with the 4-1 crib to bed functionality.

In fact, the presentation was so convincing that we ended up purchasing the crib for $750 including the tax and shipping. A $300 one day *show only* discount, a crib that had a small door, one that could be converted to a half bed and full bed could last for years, we thought.

We left the show happy … until we got home.

J and I Googled the company and were shocked to find multiple reviews/comments relating to bad customer support, poor quality, hard to get sales guys, shipments delays, delays of refunds, refusal of warranty returns, a mail fraud charge, an investigation for bad advertising practices and more.

We soon realized that we had made a first time parents-to-be mistake i.e. to buy a baby product on impulse without doing proper research.

We should have known it from the beginning – deceptive advertising practices (i.e. to call it a show rather than a seminar) to the free gifts. Also, we didn’t like that the mattresses were custom made in size and could only be purchased from them only. We failed to notice one thing that the sales guy did too i.e. although we were allowed three business days to cancel it from the day we purchased it, the date that he manually wrote on the receipt was three days but not business days. He had counted the day we were there for the show (a Sunday) and the next day (which was a holiday) as being part of the grace period. Both days were not considered business days and our three day grace period ended being a Tuesday.

We did get our refund. Thankfully, without any issues and costly problems.

So this is a good lesson learnt, and an example of what NOT to do for all new/ would be parents out there.

Please be aware of this company if you ever receive a postcard from them. The Babee Tenda products are sold by Independent Sales Distributors. From further research, it seems that their sales pitch is similar throughout the country i.e. enticing people with hundred dollars worth of gifts, calling it a show, scare tactics of baby fatalities, blurting out recall stats of competitors and then introducing their product while you are vulnerable. Plus they force you into making a decision on the spot by giving you a *three hundred dollar buy it the same day* discount and preying on the vulnerable parents-to-be (like us).

I am in no way putting down their actual product, it may well be a good one. However, overall deceptive/ bad advertising practices, their legal charges, bad support, complaints and negative reviews were just one too many.

Below are some of the complains that played a big part into our decision to cancel the sale.

Review from a couple (Yelp)
NOT Worth the Money!!
Baby Tenda committed mail fraud, court rules
Watch their subtle disclaimer
U.S. District Court Announces Baby-Tenda Ruling

From first glance, it looks like a normal Leopard photo or a realistic painting. However, this is actually a well made optical illusion made by an artist named Craig Tracy. Can you spot the illusion?

Click on the thumbnail below to enlarge it.

If you aren’t convinced, click here to see how this illusion was made.

Managed to find this leaked trailer on trailer addict. It’s the new A-Team movie teaser. The old A-Team tv series was one of my favs but I’m not sure what to make of it as a movie. It stars Liam Neeson (Hannibal), Sharlto Copley (Mad Murdock), Bradley Cooper (Faceman), mohawked Quintin “Rampage” Jackson (B.A. Baracus) and Jessica Biel (Faceman’s ex girlfriend).

Somehow it is just not the same without Mr. T and George Peppard. Liam Neeson does not sound good with an American accent too. A good choice for Mad Murdock would have been Matt Frewer of Watchmen, Eureka, Alice and the 80s show Max Headroom — he acts well as a crazy person but might have been too old for the part.

Overall, the special effects seem great (maybe a little far fetched, but that probably adds excitement to a shallow *blow everything up* movie). I’ll probably be watching this, but only because I’m a big fan of the old series.

You may have noticed something different about the blog, I’ve cleaned up a lot of dead links from old non existent sites and defunct blog directories. Plus the useless widgets that I thought would make the blog pretty are gone; they did nothing but make the blog ugly and slowed things down (what was I thinking!).

I am also going to delete all sponsored blog posts as it just degrades The Foo Logs. There will be no sponsored posts from now on.
My whole objective is to maintain a blog being about good content (rule #1 of blogging) and not one full of ads and other fancy stuff. I may have lost my purpose of why I am blogging along the way and need to rekindle the excitement. Blogging needs to be fun and pleasurable.
As this will be a gradual clean up, there are probably more links to images, URLs etc. that needs to be checked. Please let me know if you come across anything that should be dusted up. I also took off the pesky yahoo ads I was experimenting with (they just got in the way, earned me a whooping $7 or so in the process).

Some significant changes within the blog include the addition of Disqus comment system as a replacement of my Wordpress comment mechanism and Lijit as my blog search system. These two cloud based utilities add more of a community feeling to my blog, allows me to share/ reply to comments easily and adds a powerful search system to my site.

My next step would be to try to upgrade Wordpress to the latest version, I am still on version 2.03. I may have to tweak my theme as it is somehow not compatible with higher versions.

One thing I will not be changing is my Robot theme (I have five different variations of it) – love it too dearly to discard it.