Seattlest David: What's up, computer? Computer: Good evening, Dave. Everything's running smoothly. And you? Seattlest David: Well, not so great. Can you explain why the bus tunnel's computers weren't working during the busy holiday shopping season? Computer: I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that. Seattlest David: Uh, ok, well, actually, looks like everything's fixed now. How about the problem with the New Year's Eve fireworks? Computer: I'm sorry, Dave, I don't have enough......

Turns out Amazon.com's customer service department isn't staffed by computers -- just sarcasm-savvy people who use computers. Consumerist broke the story: Amazon Sends "Best Customer Service E-mail I've Ever Received". We'll summarize: One of Amazon.com's Black Friday deals was the chance to win a $1000 laptop for $299. Many people entered; most of them were unsuccessful. Some theorized that Amazon employees had snatched up all the good deals, since no one they knew had won......

Running text ads on your blog never really struck us as the Get-Richest-Quickest path; we used to have Amazon ads on a book review blog and after a year or two and no checks, we decided we could better use the real estate and quit the program. A few months later we got our first and final check for...$6ish? But Seattle's Furious Seasons blog has just discovered firsthand the pain of algorithmic rejection. The email......

Here are things you don't want cops to find when they search your apartment:Four computers, two printers, a scanner and an industrial machine that makes identity cards...$17,500 in cash, dozens of credit cards and fake driver's licenses, and keys to unlock many of the apartments and mailboxes in [your] upscale apartment building...a book titled "The Art of Cheating: A Nasty Little Book for Tricky Little Schemers and Their Hapless Victims," as well as a newspaper......

Journalist Jim Romenesko is amassing a vast barista army with which he'll one day conquer the world, or at least Seattle (Seattlest, for one, would like to welcome our new caffeinated overlords). He's doing this through his blog StarbucksGossip.com where he invites Starbucks team members to discuss various Starbucks-related news items with him. At least, that's what he seems to be doing at the site--We know he's infecting them somehow. It's like his own real-life......

Here are three vaguely computer-related crimes taken from recent headlines in Seattle, Chicago and New England. Seattle: "Man pleads guilty in cybertheft case." A 35-year-old Seattle man has pleaded guilty in federal court to mail fraud and aggravated identity theft in a scheme that utilized peer-to-peer file-sharing programs to gain access to private information from dozens of victims. Gregory Kopiloff admitted during a plea hearing Monday that, through LimeWire and other file-sharing programs, he used......

Last night, Seattlest hit up the Red Bull Big Tune 2007 Championship at Neumos just like we said we would. The idea of the competition was to showcase U.S. hip-hop producers in the form of a beat battle, tournament-style; in between rounds we were treated to the skills of DV-One and Just Blaze, and also to a mini-concert from giants De La Soul. We were not expecting this last, and it was kinda fun. Our......

We're living in the town that Microsoft Office built, and all in all it's not too shabby. Every once in a while we're struck by something and think, "wow, someone paid upwards of $300 for a graphical representation of a talking paper clip and we used the money to build this..." But generally it's been a pretty good deal for Seattle. Time marches on, though, and what was once the raison d'etre for personal computers......

Local photographer Jenny Jiménez got robbed big time. Some skeevy dudes broke into her house and stole a whole mess of shit worth over $20K, including photography equipment, computers, and her mother's wedding ring, which Jenny was going to use in her own nuptials this fall. Way to go, assholes. From her LiveJournal post: My home was burglarized yesterday morning between 8:40am and 12:30pm. All of my camera gear, both of our computers, all......

Last year, we had the joy of walking around town before the precarious date of 6/6/06 and seeing images of nuclear holocaust strung across every light poll in town (meaning on Capitol Hill). This year, we get the pleasure of anticipating our big 3-0 on a far more auspicious date: 7/7/07. As a child of 7/7/77, we've lived with the inevitability of next Saturday for our whole lives. For us, it's the only time......

Hollywood's fascination with all the terrible things Westerners do in Africa has always been a little cloying. Did anyone actually need to see Blood Diamond to get the point? Then there was The Constant Gardener, which melodramatized the all too real phenomenon of American and European drug companies finding it more expedient (if more ethically questionable) to do research on poorly educated and ill informed Third World subjects. Turns out, Hollywood could just as well......

Subject: Can you imagine that you are healthy? Although the dailies almost convinced us that spam as we know it has ended because Robert Alan Soloway was arrested yesterday, our inbox says otherwise. Subject: Orgasmotron It would seem that the zombie computers that Soloway has spamming away are still hard at work during his incarceration. Subject: So you asked for another message from Ms. Atkins, yeah? Or else he isn't solely responsible for the ruin......

And while you're at it, trash the place!! A recent Craigslist advertisement invited the general CL-viewing public to come into someone's home and take whatever they wanted. And the general CL-viewing public complied. The person who owned the home was obviously not the person who posted the ad, putting this prank at about the same level of complexity as ordering a half-dozen pizzas with weird toppings to a friend's house. Yeah, ha, ha. However, while......

Dorkbot, we've missed you. If our attendance record for the monthly technology and art event has been spotty at best recently --we've only been to one meeting since it lost the CoCA digs-- it's not because of the scheduled themes. They've all been awesome: Multimedia Performance at the Abbey, Innovation in Games back at CoCA, remote aerial photography at CHAC (actually we did get to that one)... New curator whatshisname (can't find it on the......

CASTING CALL: Local director Garrett Bennett is looking for extras to cast in his independent film The Spy & the Sparrow. 3-8pm // First Church of Christ Scientist [1519 E. Denny Way] // $Whatever minuscule remnants remain of your dreams of an acting career BOOKS: Don't wear sweatpants to this event. Erotica writer Jennifer Munro reads from her award-winning work, as does the winner of Hugo House's erotica writing competition. Keep your fingers crossed for......

KING 5's Investigators have their panties in a bunch about the racist and pornographic emails Port of Seattle police were sending on Port time, using Port computers. In their story, they can hardly bring themselves to present the liberally pixelized graphic evidence. Again and again. It turns out, "over a two-year period, 32 officers -- nearly a third of the entire force -- either received, saved, or passed on more than 175 inappropriate e-mails,......

On the heels of the old news about Amazon and dynamic pricing comes some old news about Amazon's 30-day price guarantee. That's right. Amazon will refund your money if their price on something you buy drops within 30 days of your purchase. We hadn't heard that, either. There's some new news to go with the old news, though. Using Your Accounts, you could manually check on everything you ordered in the last month. Or, this......

Seahawks Insider reports that he won't be reporting from Seahawks HQ today: The Seahawks remain without power. Players are at the facility for lifting. Coaches have generator power for the basics: watching video, using computers, running lamps, etc. There will be no media access of any kind. Tuesday is the players' day off, which means no access again. This means we will not be reporting from team headquarters until Wednesday, assuming the team has power......

If you've been hoping that itchy aneurysm of yours will pop a stroke on you and leave you blessedly free of worldly cares, we recommend the new P-I series On the Waterfront as a trigger event. We're on Day 2 of the three-day series. Yesterday featured the Port's no-bid, no-audit hospitality towards its hospitality contractor. Today covers the Port's similar treatment of the firm that runs its cruise terminals. Tomorrow Port chief Mic Dinsmore's......

We have a friend who tells a story about taking a broken TV back to Costco -- four years after she bought it. She didn't expect them to, but Costco gave her store credit. She upgraded to a nicer TV for not a lot of money, and they won her heart for life. (Lesson learned: It never hurts to ask.) According to Ben Popkin at Consumerist, though, the days of those carefree and liberal......

Another in a string of online sex stings recently caught ex King County Prosecutor's Office employee Lawrence Corrigan trying to meet up with a 13-year-old for sex. You asshole, Lawrence. Undercover detectives targeted Lawrence after learning that he was communicating with young girls online. A detective contacted him and Lawrence emailed a bunch of porn and set up a meeting outside of a Capitol Hill video store and when he showed for that meeting he......

When we heard about the Lewis County central services director who oversaw the installation of mobile computers with instant message clients in police cruisers and then used the system to make sexy time with a dozen different cops we thought the resulting IM logs would make for fascinating reading. Wrong. Not only is it hideously embarrassing, it's boring as hell and the backwards reading PDFs are awkward to read. There are a bunch of affairs......

When he last graced our fine city, Mr. Jonathan Hodgman was touring for his new book The Areas of My Expertise. He has since then become straightman-comic hawker of Apple computers and Resident Expert on the Daily Show. Seattlest could possibly be more jealous, but we're not certain. He is back on tour because his book has been released in paperback. Is that the literary equivalent of a pop-song/DJ remix mashup? We hope to find......

Ok, it's not funny when someone's house gets invaded by the cops. The continued erosion of our rights in the name of the war on terror isn't funny in the least. Perpetrating obscene phone calls isn't funny. The police making an error and therefore not apprehending the person making the obscene phone calls isn't funny, either. Multiple squad cars driving up onto someone's lawn in search of porn is, well, kind of funny. And this......

Remember half.com, the popular used media marketplace that got bought by eBay and turned into one of their red-headed step-subsidiaries? Remember when dot-coms had the money to pull wacky publicity stunts? Remember when Half.com, the company, bought the rights to rename Halfway, OR, and call it Half.com, OR? Neither did we, really -- December 1999 was so long ago! -- but we were reminded by William Drenttel's What Ever Happened to Half.com, Oregon? on Design......

We don't spend our spare time hanging out on Amazon.com, looking for new and crazy stuff they sell. So it took a Salon.com article to draw our attention to Amazon's unique new marketplace: Mechanical Turk. It was Salon's subhead that really caught our eye: "Is it a boon for the bored or a virtual sweatshop?" A virtual sweatshop? Here in Seattle? To the Mystery Machine! Amazon's explanation of what Mechanical Turk is isn't nearly as......

MySpace's bag of evils to date includes all manner of sexual assualts, rapes, molestations, and the like. If the news promo is likely to make you send the kids to bed early, MySpace has probably perpetrated it at some point and, ironically, is probably perpetrating it against your very own offspring, via the computers you installed in their rooms at the very moment you're watching the report. Cut the cable! Board up the windows! Stash......

Apple launched a missile at Redmond today by releasing software called Boot Camp that allows its super sexy new Intel-based hardware to run Windows XP. For some reason we thought it was going to be the other way around. We imagined the first bomb would be Apple releasing a version of OS X that played on standard Wintel computers which shows how much we know. Is Apple a hardware company or a software company? Boot......

For the second straight year, the Washington State Senate failed to vote on a billl that would require the phasing out of PBDEs. (We've written previously about PBDEs, which are accumulating steadily in breast milk, and are implicated in the impairment of childhood development. They're also reaching alarming levels in wildlife.) The bill had the votes to pass, but a few senators blocked the bill from coming to a vote. (They didn't include that part......

A post in Tuesday's DCist mentioned a campaign in the other Washington to adopt a bland song named "Come to Washington" as an official "city anthem." Then, in a follow-up post, DCist nominated nine other, better songs. Readers voted for their favorites and suggested a few more. The current fave seems to be the Magnetic Fields' awesomely evocative "Washington, D.C." Naturally, this has us pondering songs about Seattle -- not songs by artists from......