Category: Products & Services (Page 20 of 24)

For Christmas, I got Mika Scientific Explorer’s Spa Science Chemistry Kit, a kit that lets you make a bunch of beauty products: oatmeal masks & soaps, bath fizzies & perfurmed salts. Mika was sort of interested and Camila enjoyed it very much, and I liked it too. Making those things is not too far from cooking, a matter of mixing things together, so I can get into it.
I decided to try other kits, so I’d have activities to do with the kids, and I bought Life of the Party Lip Balm & Lotion Kit. That wasn’t as fun, as all you do is melt the lipbalm solution and then add coloring and perfume, or just add color & perfume to the pre-made lotion. We have a lot of lip balm & lotion around, and it entertained Mika for a while, but it wasn’t worth the $21 price tag (though I bought it at Michael’s with one of their weekly 40% off one item coupons). It just wasn’t that fun.
Yesterday, Michael had a 50% off one item coupon (good only yesterday and today), so I decided to go and buy another kit. I settled on Life of the Party Soap Designs Kit because it seemed the most fun of the different soap kits they had there. This kit consists of a block of transparent soap, a block of white soap, one perfume, three colors (the box said yellow, green and red, but I actually got burgundy, red and green), a flimsy plastic mold with 4 shapes (rectangular, square, circle and rectangle) and 4 soap cutters (big heart, small heart, leaf and flower). These are made of metal, and are pretty thick and sharp – also small enough to fit within small to standard size soap bars. In other words, they are smaller than the cookie cutters you may have at home.
What you do is melt the transparent soap, add color & perfume, let it set, cut with the cookie cutters. Place the cut figures on the mold, then melt some white soap and pour it on the mold with the figures. Then you let it set.
I like that there are a few steps on making the soap – it feels like you are really making it – and you get to express some of your creativity in decorating the soap (though we followed the pictures from the box, not too successfully). So all in all this was a good kit and a good value at $12 after tax & the coupon.
I wonder if I could convince Mike to go back to Michael’s and get another kit today (with another 50% off coupon). I’m thinking of this one: Cool Kids Soap Kit
Even though it’s not comestics, I’m also thinking of getting Scientific Explorer’s Mind Blowing Science Kit for Young Scientists, because they have it at Michael’s and I have the coupon.

Something is not working right at Amazon.com. The last two orders I shipped, both for items in stock, have been taking forever to ship. Not to be delivered, mind you, but to make it out of Amazon warehouses. My first order, for a tea set and a cookbook, did not ship until 12 (TWELVE) days after I placed it. My second order, for a dvd player, also said to be in stock, is taking an estimated 7 days to ship! And of course, it could be more!
In the past, when they were having problems shipping a specific item, they’d divide the order in parts, and ship them separately. This has not happened with either of the orders I made – which makes me think the problem are not the items themselves, but their whole shipping operation.
So what’s the problem? Are their workers striking? Have they laid of so many people that they cannot deal with the work they have? Are they lying when they say they have items in stock? Have they just become utterly incompetent.
I don’t know, and I’m not sure that I care. All I can say is that I’m not going to be doing any shopping at Amazon, unless I have a full month to receive the items. Too bad for them, because I use it a lot.
Update I called the Amazon customer service people and talked to them as to why my shipments were so delayed. Apparently, if you chose free shipping they can take up to 5 business days to ship your order. And they count holidays (even minor ones as veterans’ day) and Saturdays as business days, even though they work on those days. So, it’s not that they use a slower shipping service, just that they make you pay for the free shipping by holding to your order for days before they ship it. I think this did not use to be their policy, but they really want to encourage people to spend more money now that sales have gone down. The problem for them is that this will discourage customers from shopping there.
The other thing they are no longer doing is splitting orders. In the past, if one item wasn’t shipping for whatever reason, they’d mail you whatever was available. No longer – unless you specifically pay for it. Again, not a customer friendly policy.
Anyway, my conversations with the customer service people did bear fruits, and both the DVD player and the case for such player were shipped yesterday – and they should be here well before my thanksgiving trip.

I just found out about this website, Snagfilms where you can watch full-length documentaries online. They deal mostly with progressive issues – I’m watching one now called Perversion of Justice, about a mom who was sentenced to life in prison for being involved (as in helping with the wire transfers) of a drug dealing relative. Life in prison, if you can imagine that. It’s unconscionable.
Anyway, check out the site.

I just found out about a new search engined called cuil, started by some former google engineers. It’s supposed to be better than google, of course, so I decided to take it for a test ride. It sucked. I typed in the name Julián Corres, an Argentine torturer who recently escaped from a police station. They didn’t have one single hit related to him. I tried the name of various disappeared people that we feature in Proyecto Desaparecidos – there were no hits for them either. And this from a search engine that claims that has more indexed pages than google.
I tried googling family members names. Mine gave results similar to those in google – but there were only 3 hits for Michaela’s – and none to pages with much relevancy.
Cuil has this “cool” feature in that along with page summaries, it provides pictures that supposedly, illustrate your search. But the pictures are pretty random. Type Mike Katz and you won’t find any links to my Mike Katz’ pages – but you will see a picture next to a link to a singer with his name. WTF!
Anyway, I do wish that someone would come up with a better search engine than google. I know that google has great limitations, as when I search for my name it gives me a link to an article I sent to a mailing list over a decade ago – not the most relevant of informations (cuil, btw, does the same thing). But cuil, unfortunately, is not it.