Everywhere I go, people seem to be talking about Pinkberry. I’m not a big yogurt fan but since they seem to be multiplying like rabbits, I decided to try it out.

As yogurt goes, it’s very tasty and I can see how people get addicted to it. After my initial purchase, I decided to try the coffee and green tea flavors. To me, they all pretty much tasted the same, except for a faint coffee or green tea flavor added.

As for the basic taste of Pinkberry, It has a somewhat spoiled milk sour taste. But in a almost drug-like way, it makes you want more of it. I think it’s possible that there’s some type of chemical, natural or not, that’s inside every cup of this yogurt. Originally, Coca-cola used extracts from coca leaves (which create cocaine) in every bottle. No wonder it was a hit.

There could be something similar in Pinkberry. That doesn’t mean that it’s unhealthy or bad for you. Maybe whatever is in it that’s addictive is good for you. Or not.

By I digress. The reason for this post is that I noticed that sometimes they charge sales tax, and sometimes they don’t. I was so confused by this, I asked the manager at Pinkberry. She told me that the law requires a “dine-in” tax. Therefore, if you ask for the Pinkberry “to-go,” there’s no tax.

Huh? Really? But when I get my Jack-in-the-Box “to-go,” I still have to pay tax.  The only thing I could figure out is that yogurt is a diary product, and I know milk is sales tax free at the grocery store. So does yogurt fall under this catagory?

The Pinkberry manager went as far as to say that if I were to order my yogurt “to-go,” then just sat down at one of the tables, there’s nothing she could do about it. .

Hmmm. Very interesting. Am I the last person on earth to figure this out? For all I know, since I’m new to yogurt, people may have had this thing figured out for years.

All I know is, from now on, it’s “TO-GO” please!

Tokyo Wako is a teppan-yaki place very similar to Benihana.   They have several in Los Angeles, but this one is located in the Paseo Colorado Mall.

In case you’ve never been to one of these places, people sit around a grill where a chef prepares your food in front of everyone.  Teppan in Japanese means “grill” and yaki means “broil.”  The attraction is that the chef makes a big show out of the cooking, especially using some samurai like skills to cut the meat.

As far as the food, it’s acceptable and if you’ve been to any Benihana, this one is almost identical, all the way down to the way the chefs make the onion volcano and cut the food. Okay, let’s be honest.  It’s a complete rip-off of Benihana.  I guess there’s no way to copyright or patent food preparation techniques in business.

Don’t come here for the sushi, but they do have it available for people who want more food than just the beef or chicken.

Tokyo Wako – Pasadena
330 E. Colorado Blvd., #239
Pasadena, CA 91101
(626) 440-0670
tokyo-wako.com

My friend Sam gave me this shirt for Christmas.

The Glendale Galleria has a vending machine that’s similar to the Proactiv one in Century City.  My friend Sam took this picture with his cell phone and you can see that it’s basically the same robot vending machine but setup to dispense iPods instead of Proactiv.

I’m still waiting for DVD, and cell phone vending machines.

As the holiday season goes into overdrive, so does gas prices.  It’s such an interesting coincidence that when people have to travel to meet their friends and family, the oil companies jack up the gas prices.  Weird.

This is a picture of a gas station price sign in downtown, that is electronic (maybe LED), and not the regular plastic numbers that they have to manually change with a stick.

With prices fluctuating so often, you would think that all the gas stations would get this high tech sign with electronic numbers that probably can be updated via the Internet.

Of course, this convenience could encourage the gas station owners to change the prices every hour, on the hour.  Maybe it’s not such a good idea afterall.  At least not for us drivers.

Most people have seen these automated checkout machines at their local grocery store.  This one pictured is called “U-SCAN” and is at my local 24 hours Ralphs.  I love that it’s open 24 hours, and it’s also right next to a Best Buy.  Perfect.

If you’ve never seen one, it’s basically a bunch of checkout stands that the customer can operate on their own.  You scan your items over the bar code reader, the same way that the “professional” cashier does it.

You use the touch screen (shown here) and follow the instructions, including using your credit card, ATM card or cash.  You can even use coupons.  Of course, there’s a employee watching to make sure you don’t cheat and put stuff into your bag without scanning them.  I’m sure some people have figured out how to cheat this setup but for me, I use it because it’s fast.

Today, I noticed yet another Windows XP pop-up message on this particular checkout machine.  This one was closed for obvious reasons.

Click on the picture to see a close up of the error message.  It’s kind of a weird one (hope the hard drive is okay), and not as cool as the “blue screen of death,” but still worth this post to remind all of us how nicely Windows XP works for imbedded applications like this.

Since we are officially in the Christmas shopping season, I though I’d share my shopping pictures with everyone.

During my trip to the Westside Pavilion, I noticed that one of the plasma driven advertisement had a pop-up window on it so I took this picture.

It looks like the computer is on Windows XP and it got disconnected from the Internet or something.  Something else that I noticed was that although there was another plasma on the other side, they must have been connected to different computers because the same error didn’t show up on the other screen.

To me, this seems like overkill.  Why can’t one computer drive 2 screens.  I don’t understand why they need 2 computers to drive 2 screens that are back to back.  Maybe they have too much money and not enough engineers.

I assume new ads are being downloaded via the Internet to these ad displays, so if this one is disconnected, I guess it’s showing the same banner.  Hopefully, they have some type of watchdog process that will send a message to them telling them of the error… oh, they’re disconnected.  Well, maybe a watchdog process on the server side.

Here’s a bigger picture of the error pop-up screen in case you’re a hacker and want to see the IP address.

It’s not as cool as those monster sized billboards with the “blue screen of death,” but it’s still fun to see that Windows is being used even for a simple application like this.  I just don’t understand why imbedded applications like this don’t use Linux.

At least we’re one step closer to living in the world of the “Blade Runner.”  More ads like this with video all over the city and we’re there.

Since I don’t do a lot of shopping, I never saw this vending machine before.  Perhaps, it’s all over the place but I’ve never seen it.  I found this at the Westfield Century City Mall, or whatever it’s called now, near the AMC movie theaters.

It looks like a large sized vending machine but it’s a lot more complicated than that.  Not only is there a touch screen on the right, plus a credit card swipe, there’s also another monitor showing demos on the upper left.

Also, the products don’t fall off the edge like a regular food vending machine.  A robotic arm actually picks up the product.  This same technology could be used to sell anything.  I guess we’re only one step away from getting rid of cashiers altogether.

I didn’t buy anything so I’m not positive how it works but it looks like something they would have in Japan.  They love robots over there.

I wish they had 24 hour vending machines that rented DVDs and video games.  I guess with downloading, renting DVDs will be a thing of the past very soon too.

As you know, I have Time Warner cable and broadband cable for my Internet.  I also use Vonage for my landline phone via the broadband cable.

For the second time this year, my cable Internet connection failed and after trying several times, I was not able to get my connection back.  So, I called Time Warner customer service and they told me that because of the Labor day weekend, Tuesday was the first day they could come out to fix the problem.  Also, the repair person could come any time from 9am to 7pm.  Not very good.

Since I didn’t have a choice, I decided to take the day off on Tuesday so that I can have my cable Internet connection repaired.  The customer support rep told me the repair person would call me about 30 minutes before coming.  I told her that since my phone is VoIP, they would have to call me on my cell phone to contact me.  She noted my cell number and told me they would call that number.

After a second day of being without Internet, I decided I had to try to see what I could do myself.  The last time the repair guy came, he just replaced all cables and it worked.  So I decided to replace one of the short cables.  Sure enough, that’s all it took to get it to work again.  Nice.

Then, the next day, I get an automated computer call on my Vonage voice mail from Time Warner reminding me of my appointment and an option to cancel by calling a toll free number.  I follow the instructions to cancel my appointment.  However, the next day, I get yet another identical reminder call.

First off, they should not be calling me on my Vonage number because I told them that it would not work since my Internet connection wasn’t working and I gave them my cell phone number.  On top of that, their system doesn’t seem to work when I try to cancel.  The second time, I call and go through their multi-level menu system and finally get a live person so that I can confirm the cancelation.

Finally, when I get through, the customer support rep was out of breath for some reason.  Sort of like she ran to her phone or was in a fight.  Weird.  Anyway, I could barely hear her because of all the background noise and other reps talking so loud.  I could literally hear other reps repeating phone numbers and addresses.  This didn’t give me a warm and fuzzy about my private information over there.  When I asked to cancel my appointment, the rep told me that it had already been canceled.  Oh brother.

I love the way these companies love wasting your time for no reason and their robots (both computerized and human) just do what they are told without any regard to personalization.  How uncommon is it for people to have their phone on VoIP, which would not function if their Internet connection is down?  Oh well.  Just venting.  I’m sure nothing will change with their so called customer service.

Needing some paper for my printer, I went to Office Depot a few weeks ago. They had some type of sale on their HP Multipurpose 8.5 x 11, 500 sheets paper for $6.99 each. However, there was a sign that said, buy 2, get one free.

I assumed the sign meant that you buy 2 of them and you get the third one free. That sounded like a good deal, if I understood the sign correctly.

There was a line at the checkout, but when I finally got to the front, I asked about the deal. The cachier looked slightly puzzled, but quickly said the paper was on sale for $4.99.

That sounded even better so I asked about the buy 2, get one free.  She says something like, “Yeah, we can do that.” She pushes some buttons on her register and tells me the total is $10.80.

I didn’t want to ask any questions so I quickly paid and left the building before they figured out their error and have security grab me in the parking lot.

After I got in the car, I looked at the receipt and saw that the cashier had done what was listed as a “price override,” then took off another $4.99 to give me the 3rd one for free.

Price override? Hmmm. You mean I can just ask the cashier to sell me stuff for less money? How come I didn’t know about this before?