pileofcrapola

Airbnb has grown to be the most popular alternative to a traditional hotel, but there are other options out there. Here are a few services that share a lot of the same perks.

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Skip the battery tester and use this quick and easy way to test if your batteries are dead: Just drop them.

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Shopping for glasses used to mean dealing with salesmen and the meager selection at a store in the mall. Now you can order better frames online, for less money, with better customer service. We asked you for your favorite stores, and here are five of the best, based on your nominations.

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The next time you are looking an inexpensive hotel room at the last minute, try asking for an "out of order" rate for a great deal.

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Residents of a Southern California neighborhood can rest a little easier now, after animal-control officers tracked down and captured an albino monocled cobra on the loose that had been slithering around the Thousand Oaks neighborhood since at least Monday. The owner still remains a mystery, while the snake will now have a new home at the Los Angeles Zoo. [Associated Press]

The Virginia Aquarium Stranding Response Team is releasing three rehabilitated sea turtles back into the ocean.

I'm in my early 20's and can finally afford to buy a really cool performance car like a WRX or a Focus ST, but every time I go to the dealer for a test drive I get ignored. How can I get the salespeople to take me seriously, so I can test drive these cars and find out what I really want?

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Summer's beloved fruit, the watermelon, can get pretty messy to eat. Instead of serving the melon in traditional wedges, cut it into sticks—easy finger foods.

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Online coupons may appear to be released at random. But, if you look closely, patterns emerge. Knowing when stores are more likely to release new offers allows you to strategize for savings—and perhaps save some time looking for discounts in the process.

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When you're trying to build a career, it can be hard to figure out where to start. Muse U aims to provide a starting point for new and seasoned ladder-climbers alike.

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You don't need a ton of money to make your home look better to potential buyers. Here are a few inexpensive things you can do, which could make all the difference when it comes to selling your home.

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Chrome: The latest stable build of Google Chrome can lock your browser when you step away, to protect your data and privacy. All you have to do is change a setting to enable the new profile management system—no extensions needed.

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Shopping for glasses used to mean dealing with salespeople selling expensive frames at the mall. Now you can get better glasses with more options, cheaper, all from the comfort of your computer. This week, we want to hear about the stores you browse when you shop for a new pair.

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When you pull up to a farmer’s market, ready to stock up on locally grown produce, you’d probably assume that everything on sale was raised by the farmers doing the selling, or that it was at least from another local grower. But you may be buying food that’s actually been trucked in from hundreds of miles away, possibly from another country.

In a “confession” piece for Modern Farmer, a former farm intern relates his tale of realizing that he’d been deceiving customers when he told them they were buying locally grown produce at the market.

The author says he was happy toiling on a large New England farm in exchange for room, board, and on-the-job experience. He also enjoyed being part of the local farming community and working at the markets.

Then a customer asked him about the kale. That’s where it all started to go wrong.

The customer asked if the kale he was selling had been grown at the farm where he worked. He assumed it was; even though he’d never see any kale growing, it was a large farm so it was highly possible that he just hadn’t come across it yet.

Later, the intern came across the box that the kale had been in and found that it was actually from a farm several hundred miles to the south in Georgia.

Shocked, the intern spoke to the farm’s owner the next day and had his worst suspicions confirmed.

“I asked him where all of the products we were selling at the market were coming from, and he said that not all of it was coming from the farm, that some of it was coming from other farms, and I asked was it coming from local farms and he said some of it was not,” recalls the intern. “He was honest with me — he said that they had to do it to stay competitive, and that other farms did it as well.”

Things only got worse from there. The next day, his supervisor had the intern re-packaging salad greens from California into small plastic baggies with the New England farm’s label on them. Then there were the asparagus from Canada that were also going to the local markets.

That was enough for the intern to realize he didn’t want to be party to this deception.

“I felt claiming to be a sustainable farm but shipping products in from all over the country was wrong,” he writes. “I also felt as though they were lying to their customers. I actually watched folks knowingly lie at markets. Other coworkers of mine told customers that the products they were buying were grown on our farm, when in fact they were not. And this all came as a realization to me very quickly, which was why I quit very quickly.”

He’s now back in Wyoming, working a few days a week on a farm that doesn’t sell food grown by people thousands of miles away.

This is the dilemma facing some farmers who sell directly to consumers at markets. Shoppers want the freshness that often comes with buying local, and they want to support farmers in their region, but many consumers also want the variety and one-stop shopping aspect they’ve come to expect from going to the supermarket.

So a farmer who is constantly asked “Do you guys grow kale?” may be tempted to go out and get some to have on sale just so they never have to tell a shopper no. But do you tell that customer that the kale is from 800 miles away and is probably the same stuff that could be bought at the megastore in town? Or do you try to keep up the veil of sustainability by repackaging the product to appear locally grown?

Boa constrictor was on the menu this week at an Illinois Burger King, but not in the sense that you could eat one. No, we mean on the menu board at the drive-thru. Wednesday afternoon, customers alerted the restaurant’s employees that there was a boa constrictor relaxing near the drive-thru lane. How did it get there? No one knows.

When the store’s assistant manager was told that there was a snake outside, she thought that the customer meant a garden snake curled around the speaker or something. No one expected an almost 6-foot boa constrictor to be greeting customers.

“We had one of our crew members out here taming it with a broom the whole time, keeping it right here, so it wouldn’t go somewhere else,” the assistant manager told TV station KWQC.

The employees called Animal Control, which is what you do when in incomprehensible animal that is not native to Illinois shows up in your drive-thru. Since the local government isn’t set up to handle snakes, they brought it to a local aquarium and reptile store.

The experts there said that the snake was friendly and tame, and had obviously been a house pet. What isn’t so obvious is how it ended up at the Burger King. Did it escape, or was it let loose? The store manager said that people often let large snakes loose when they grow larger than the owner had expected.

The store doesn’t know the snake’s sex yet, but we suggest naming it King if it happens to be male. Really, what else could you call it?

Customers Spot Boa Constrictor at Burger King [KWQC]

The first instinct for most people when being attacked is to defend themselves. But a group of Walmart workers say their right to self-defense ended up getting them fired. Now the Utah’s highest court is considering whether store policies trump employees’ right to defend themselves.

The Salt Lake Tribune reports that six former Walmart employees were fired after separate confrontations with shoplifting customers or another employee’s angry spouse.

An attorney for the six told the court on Wednesday that the workers should not have to make a “terrible choice” of trying to ensure their safety or keep their jobs.

But Walmart says the six employees violated company policy that requires them to back away from confrontations where a suspected shoplifter or customer brandishes a weapon. The employee is then instructed to withdraw to a safe position and contact law enforcement.

Two of the six employees were fired after a Christmas Eve incident in 2010 when they grabbed a shoplifter who was attempting to run. The woman then allegedly pulled a knife and throated to stab the workers.

Officials with the company say the employees were fired because they should have backed away from the woman instead of grabbing her. However, the employees say they grabbed the woman before she brandished the knife.

In a separate 2010 incident, an assistant store manager was fired after he confronted the husband of another employee who believed the two co-workers were having an affair. The assistant manager allegedly shoved the husband into shelves after he had walked away pulling his wife by the arm.

The final incident occurred in January 2011 when three employees of a Utah Walmart were fired after they confronted a man who had put a laptop computer down his pants and escorted him to a security office. Once entering the office, the man allegedly showed the employees a gun.

The employees grabbed the weapon and pinned the man against the wall until police arrived. Officials with Walmart say the trio was fired because they should have allowed the man to leave the office and not wrestled with him.

After the firings, the employees filed a federal lawsuit claiming that Walmart implied they would not be fired for the acts of self-defense if they went through extra training.

Last year, a U.S. District Judge ruled the firings were legitimate because the employees were at-will workers and not subject to contracts. However, she asked the Utah Supreme Court to decide whether there is an exception in Utah’s law for self-defense as a “legal right or privilege” that would mean employees can’t be fired.

An attorney for Walmart told the Supreme Court on Wednesday that allowing the exception would “take the decision away from Walmart, away from the employer, and put it in the hands of the judiciary.”

The Tribune reports that reaction from the judges was mixed, with several objecting to Walmart’s characterization, saying there are frequently lawsuits over whether people are wrongly fired and that public policy creates contains that allow them to sue.

Others found the statements by the fired employees’ attorney to be an overgeneralization, saying it was understandable for a “large retail establishment to choose de-escalation rather than a stand-your-ground style of self-defense.”

The court will take the case under advisement, the Tribune reports.

This isn’t the first time Walmart has made headlines for firing employees who claim to be using self-defense. Back in 2010, a Florida greeter says he was fired after he fought a customer who attacked him.

Last October, a Walmart employee in Michigan was fired after he intervened to stop an assault against a customer in the store’s parking lot. Shortly after the story broke, Walmart backtracked and offered the employee his job back, but the man declined.

Fired Wal-Mart workers say they have right to self-defense [The Salt Lake Tribune]

There’s a reason there are rules about which pets you can and can’t have. A cat? Sure, have one of those! But you couldn’t bring a tiger home and toss it a yarn ball. So if you want a snake — great! Mr. Slithers is a nice name. Bringing home a deadly albino cobra though, well that’s what’s got officials in Los Angeles worked up, after it escaped from whoever was keeping it.

The Los Angeles County Department of Animal Care and Control is searching high and low in the Thousand Oaks neighborhood to find the hooded viper, which may have been a pet, reports FoxNews.com.

Officials are warning people to take care and keep their eyes peeled for the snake, which is “very dangerous and venomous.”

“Do not approach it, do not try to capture it, do not try to kill it,” said a Los Angeles County spokesman, adding that if the cobra does strike someone, anti-venom is at the ready to be flown in from the San Diego Zoo.

Keeping a cobra is against the law in California outside of educational and scientific purposes, and even then you need a permit. This particular snake, the monocled cobra, can grow more than four feet long.

And there’s really no reason to keep a cobra in your house, says the owner of one pet store, which is why it’s odd that someone might’ve been keeping one without the proper safety measures like a double-locked cage.

“I am very disturbed,” he said. “I don’t think there is anything positive about finding a monocled cobra.”

California authorities hunt albino cobra in upscale neighborhood [FoxNews.com]

For decades, sick people in search of a night’s rest — and high school kids in search of something to amuse themselves with — took Vicks NyQuil, and eventually woke up, often feeling like they’d hibernated for a season. Then they introduced DayQuil, which takes away all the fun of NyQuil, but supposedly lets you do your job without nodding out mid-meeting. More recently, Vicks added ZzzQuil and the bizarrely named QlearQuil, but what the H-E-double-hockey-sticks are they all about?

Let’s start with the main attraction, NyQuil.
The active ingredients are: the pain reliever/fever reducer acetaminophen, the same drug in Tylenol; the cough suppressant dextromethorphan, which is in countless cough medicines and accounts for some drowsiness; and the antihistamine doxylamine succinate, the primary source of your sleepiness.

The stronger NyQuil Severe has all those ingredients, but tosses in the nasal decongestant phenylephrine.

NyQuil Cough omits the acetaminophen but has the dextromethorphan and doxylamine succinate to cut down on your coughing.

DayQuil has acetaminophen like its more famous kin and the phenylephrine found in Severe, but keeps you from nodding off by having a lower level of dextromethorphan and no antihistamines.

ZzzQuil is not some mystical sleep syrup, nor is it just the sleepy stuff from NyQuil. In fact, it’s just diphenhydramine, the antihistamine found in Benadryl and countless generic allergy medicines.

So if ZzzQuil is just a popular antihistamine, what’s in allergy-targeted QlearQuil?
Depends on which version you buy:
• The Nighttime Allergy Relief version of QlearQuil is identical to ZzzQuil, with diphenhydramine being the only active ingredient.
• The All Day & All Night 24 Hour Allergy Relief version is a different antihistamine — loratadine, the active ingredient made popular in Claritin.
• The Nighttime Sinus & Congestion Relief version has multiple ingredients — acetaminophen; doxylamine succinate; and phenylephrine.
• The Daytime Sinus & Congestion Relief version is the same as the nighttime, but sans the doxylamine succinate.

This isn’t just to help people sort out which of the many, many ‘Quils they come across while perusing drugstore shelves, but to show that consumers don’t always know what they’re getting when they grab a bottle.

One potential problem with having all these varieties is that some, but not all, contain acetaminophen, and none of them go out of their way to way to highlight the fact that acetaminophen is included. Some sick people won’t think twice about taking a Tylenol at the same time as they guzzle some NyQuil — or take DayQuil without realizing it contains the painkiller — not knowing they risk doing damage to their liver by doubling up on the acetaminophen.

The 3-year-old Great Dane was miserable and retching when its owners rushed him to a northwest Portland emergency animal hospital.

High rent forces City Tavern move Inside NoVA City Tavern, which has been at the corner of Church and Main streets in Manassas for about 20 years, will soon be moving to a new location. The restaurant is moving to the old KC's restaurant building, 9550 Center St., City Tavern owner Nick Veltsistas ...

A West Virginia prisoner already serving a life term has pleaded guilty to first-degree murder in the decades-old slaying of a man who managed a famed estate in Virginia's horse country.

Whether it's a big disaster or someone gets hurt around the house, knowing how best to respond might affect who lives or dies. Many communities offer free training to ensure their residents are prepared for the worst.

Is the Asian camel cricket invasion something to be feared?

UPDATE: Facebook appears to be back. Continue breathing. In the meantime, we’ve reached out to the company to see what could’ve possibly prompted such a brief, yet panicked outage, and will let you know when we hear back.

————————ORIGINAL STORY BELOW—————————–

Bring out the trumpets, bang the cymbals and clang whatever Internet instruments you’d like — Facebook appears to be down for a whole lot of people right now.

Over at DownForEveryoneOrJustMe.com, the site confirms that as of about 3:45 ET, Facebook is down for everyone right now, not just you.

It appears Facebook has crashed on both mobile and web versions, with TechCrunch reporting that users in the United States as well as in the United Kingdom, Germany and other parts of the world have reported outages.

A quick Twitter search confirms that indeed, many people cannot access Facebook.

Stay tuned for more updates, or just keep hitting “refresh” on your browser. You can get through this. We all can. We’ve done it before, and we’ll do it again.

Or just watch this, because I will find any excuse to post it:

Reader Maxim is running a campaign on the crowdfunding platform Kickstarter right now to print up some really cool playing cards. Yet he didn’t contact us to ask us to write about his project: we don’t normally post about items in the crowdfunding phase, anyway. He was concerned about a message he received from another Kickstarter campaign creator, who was asking him to swap pledges to artificially inflate each other’s totals.

How would that work? On Kickstarter, you don’t receive any of the money you’ve raised unless you raise the full budget. Say, for example, you set a budget of $10 to make some potato salad, but are only able to raise $9. That would be considered an unsuccessful campaign, and you wouldn’t get any of the money. If you raised $11, or $55,500, you would get it all (minus fees.)

Here’s part of the message that Maxim received:

Hi there Here is an idea for cross promotion You donate some money to my campaign and I donate to your campaign and I will post your campaign to my social media (FB and YouTube)

Examples: If you donate $50 I donate $70, if you donate $20 I donate $30 if you donate $10 I donate $15. If you donate less than $10 I donate same amount.

We know that Maxim wasn’t the only campaign creator who received this message. However, is it fair or ethical to go all “Strangers on a Train” with Kickstarter pledges? You can’t pledge to your own campaign, but is this the next best thing?

While it’s good to support your fellow creative people, there’s a way to exploit such a request. Simply make this kind of agreement with other campaigns that appear to be struggling. If they don’t make their funding goal, you don’t owe any money at all. If you make your funding goal, they’re on the hook while you don’t owe anything. We’re not saying that is what this particular user had in mind, but it’s one way to artificially boost your numbers and run a scam.

We contacted Kickstarter to ask how the rules applied in cases like this one. While they can’t discuss specific situations involving their users, Kickstarter pointed us toward their Community Guidelines, which say quite clearly that sending unsolicited messages to other members is very much Against The Rules. So is spamming people about your campaign outside of Kickstarter.

That avoids the moral question of whether it’s okay to swap pledges in this way, since approaching other campaigns randomly isn’t allowed in the first place. Let’s settle this in the time-honored way of all moral arguments: with a poll.

Take Our Poll

(Also, here’s Maxim’s campaign, if you’re curious.)

While Home Depot has yet to confirm or deny whether it was indeed hit by a massive breach of its payment system, a look at the data for a huge batch of stolen credit cards that recently went up for sale on the black market seems to indicate that the hack could have hit nearly all Home Depot stores in the U.S.

Cybersecurity reporter Brian Krebs, who first broke the news of a possible Home Depot breach, has since looked at the location info (city, state, ZIP code) available for this cache of stolen card numbers and compared them to a list of address info for Home Depot stores.

“A comparison of the ZIP code data between the unique ZIPs represented on [the black market site], and those of the Home Depot stores shows a staggering 99.4 percent overlap,” writes Krebs.

To make sure that this wasn’t just a coincidence — after all, Home Depot is a national chain — he then spoke with Nicholas Weaver, a researcher at the International Computer Science Institute and at the University California, Berkeley, who explained that, “A 99+ percent overlap in ZIP codes strongly suggests that this source is from Home Depot.”

Of the approximately 2,200 Home Depot stores in the U.S., Krebs only found 127 who were not represented in the ZIP code data. However, since the cards for sale likely only represent a fraction of the total number that were stolen, it’s possible those stores were hit but were just not included in this batch.

For those that want to test his work, Krebs is making the source data available. Here are the ZIP codes for the stolen cards currently available on the black market; here are the ZIP codes for Home Depot stores in the U.S.

Bank sources are saying this breach could have begun as early as April or May of this year. Given the sheer number of Home Depot stores and the many months during which the theft might have been ongoing, this could end up being significantly larger than the Target breach from last holiday season, which only lasted a few weeks (though they were the busiest shopping weeks of the year).

Earlier today, Home Depot said it was still investigating the possibility of a breach but reminded customers that they would not be held liable for any fraudulent charges made to their cards.

Fairfax County Animal Watch Washington Post No incidents were reported by the Animal Control Division of the Fairfax County Police Department. For information, call 703-246-2253. FAIRFAX CITY. The following incidents were reported by the animal control section of the Fairfax City Police Department. and more »

Prince William County community calendar, Sept. 4-10, 2014 Washington Post Manassas farmers market, 7:30 a.m.-1 p.m. Thursdays, Loy E. Harris Pavilion, 9201 Center St., and 7:30 a.m.-1 p.m. Saturdays, Parking Lot B, West Street (next to the train station visitors center). 703-361-6599 or www.visitmanassas.org. “War and Peace” ... and more »

Officials at the Naval Air Station Patuxent River say an infant has been found dead in a vehicle at the station.