We're down to the last two days of bachelorettehood, me and the doglet, since husband comes home from the wilderness of Canada on Friday. This morning she came bounding across the terrain of bedclothes like a little antelope in the veldt. Most fetching, my little bitch.
This barcode scam is in the news today, but as is common, the most interesting nugget in the story is buried and not expanded upon. A kid at uni in Boulder downloaded a home-grown barcode program and switched the barcode on a $149. ipod for a $4.99 barcode, and Target busted him. In the article it mentions another guy in Reno stole more than $200,000 of Legos with a barcode scam, and that is what I'm really curious about. Sniffing around a search engine yielded this information, and I'm just baffled someone would be so brazen and get away with it so long - they must not be hiring bright souls to fill their red shirts. He went to Target stores in about 5 or 6 states and bought up Star Wars Lego sets with a cheaper bar code and then re-sold the sets online. He apparently netted about $600,000 before caught. These were devious uses of barcode, but I think barcode tampering can be a lot of harmless fun. Take for example the shenanigans of Rob over at the magnificent http://www.cockeyed.com/ -take an hour or two there - you'll thank me. Rob is scintillating wit who asks why things are the way they are and then bites back in a jovial way. Anyone who sent him a self-addressed envelope received a barcode identical to his to stick over their safeway club card which tracks customer purchases. So in one day, his card might be swiped for kitty litter in San Francisco, Jim Beam in Arizona, and tampons and froot loops in New Jersey. It was a thing of beauty. Reviling as I do the store "club cards" which compel you to exchange personal trackable information for savings, I think more of us should share barcodes, just to addle corporate demographics.
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