Don't shop Babies R Us.

I didn't really care for Babies R Us in the first place. However, we were given several gifts for the birth of our second daughter which ended up being things we already had. We happened to be in the market for some other items that BRU does sell, so we figured we would return the unopened, extra items to our local BRU (as we have done before), accept the store credit, and use that to cover the cost of the items we do want. Unfortunately, I was informed by the customer service individual that she couldn't accept the items without a receipt. No reasoning changed her mind, so at that point I announced that we will be taking our money elsewhere. I would expect companies to want my money in this economy, but who am I to tell them how to run a business.

I think Babies R Us may be on the trail of Circuit City. Is there a phrase for this, a la "Jumping the Shark?"

Reducing reduce

The reduce function apparently isn't for everyone, but for those of us who use Python and sometimes think in Lisp, it's great to write statements like this:

reduce(lambda x,y:x*y, [word.isalpha() for word in words])

How else would you determine whether each of the words in a list uses only characters from the alphabet?

Due to constraints at work, my Python knowledge is often deeply based off of version 2.3. Now that I'm hacking on python 2.5 in my spare time, it's high time I ought to use some of the new functions available; namely, any and all. Guido makes a decent case for replacing reduce with these functions since the only easy to understand reduce statements boil down to associative operations like my boolean multiplication above. We can now rewrite my reduce as:

all([word.isalpha() for word in words])

So it's even shorter and reads very nicely. And it only took me four years to catch up.

LEDWatch.org

We get a lot of e-mail sent to info at StimulusWatch.org. A lot of it is straight tirade. A lot of it is praise. A lot of it is confusion. And then, there are e-mails like this one from Cynthia J Hironimus:

Good Afternoon,

I have a yard light that comes on at dusk and off at dawn. We are using a 175W Mercury Vapor Bulb at the present time. I bought a compact fluorescent Yard Light Buster Bulb that uses 65W. Is it possible to replace with LED instead of fluorescent and would that be a better choice?

Thank-you for your time,

Cindi Hironimus

Cindi, it's a good question, but we have no idea.