UPDATE:
Wicked Lasers has come through. Read about it here.



I mean it. Wicked Lasers, a company I once believed to be a high-end player in the portable laser field. Their lasers cost three to four times as much as similar lasers on cheap Chinese sites. "They must be good!", I believed. How wrong I was... read on to find out why.

Alright, set your wayback machine to June, 2010. An article is posted on Gizmodo about the new Spyder III Pro Arctic blue laser, being offered by Wicked Lasers for only $200.



"What a deal!" I said, along with about a million other people. I immediately rushed to the Wicked Lasers website and placed my order. June 11th was the date of my order.

A few days later, I noticed that the page had been updated -- they were now offering safety glasses and an optics kit as an option for the laser, at a discounted price. I emailed their support staff to ask if I could add it to my order. "No problem", I was told, and they asked me to send $79 to their PayPal email address. I did immediately. This was June 23rd.

Weeks went by, with no sign of the laser shipping. After a month, I inquired as to the status of my order. I was told that there were delays, they couldn't meet production, but shipping would begin soon. I continued to wait.

Weeks turned into months, and every now and again I would ask for an order update. Finally, I was told that my credit card was declined (it wasn't), so I provided the details again. Nearly at the end of September, my order finally shipped, and I received a tracking number.

Naturally, I checked my credit card statement and they had overcharged me by $80. I figured I'd deal with it when the laser actually arrived.

Skip ahead another month, to the end of October, and I still haven't received my laser. According to the tracking page it's been stuck "in customs" since the beginning of October, and there's nothing either the postal service or Customs can do about it. "Only the shipper can initiate a trace" I was told.

I contact Wicked Lasers one more time. I explain the situation, and they decide to refund my order. "Not what I wanted", I thought. But, oh well. Except the refund didn't come, and neither did the laser. Fed up, I called my credit card and filed a fraud claim on the charge. They accepted the claim and as of today, November 22nd, I have my $307 back.

However, I had paid separately via PayPal for the additions to my order. I called and emailed, and I was told that they "no longer have PayPal". This is the last message I received, from today:

We no longer have paypal, I need to check with shipping and find out the status on your laser. Best regards, Colin Customer Support Wicked Lasers

I wrote back:

Hi, I'm not interested in whether or not you have PayPal. You had it in June and that was your preferred method of payment when I asked to add to my order. The tracking number for my order is [redacted]. You can see that it was never delivered, and has been stuck in customs since October 6th, over a month and a half. The package has obviously been lost. I used to think your company was great. "One day, I'll be able to buy one of Wicked Lasers' awesome lasers", I used to say. No joke. I truly believed that you were the best laser company out there. Your prices were very high, but I believed the quality was on the level. The last five and a half months have broken down that (undeserved) high regard bit by bit. First, my order doesn't ship. Then, my emails and phone calls and tickets are ignored. Then, four months later, my credit card is overcharged by nearly $90. The order is shipped but never arrives. My attempts to get it reshipped or investigated are ignored. I'm told that my payment has been refunded, but it wasn't (I had to file a fraud claim with my credit card to get my money back). I don't care about the laser anymore. I've already ordered a similar laser from DragonLasers, for only $30 more than I was to originally have paid, and guess what? It showed up in less than 2 weeks. It works great, and it's everything I wanted. You've wasted my time. You've taken my money. And you've ensured that I will never, ever do business with you again. The least you can do is give me back the last $80 that you stole from me and let me get on with my life.

I'm posting this here, now, after nearly six months because I want to make sure that people know to stay away from Wicked Lasers. Even if they end up giving me back my $80, that won't even come close to making up for the hassle and the pain they've put me through.

I've included the complete text of my support conversation with them (personal details redacted). Click to see all of it.




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Lately, I've been seeing an annoying series of banners on every Wikipedia article, featuring founder Jimmy Wales in a thought-provoking pose, appealing to you to give him a minimum suggested donation of $30.

These ads always bothered me, and I recently decided to do some research to confirm my suspicions. I basically wanted to find out how a site that should have very few expenses needs so many millions.

Here is Wikimedia's financial report from 2008.
http://upload.wiki...ia_20072008_fs.pdf

In 2008, they received 4.4 million in "contributions" and spent 3.5 million. Interestingly, the internet hosting cost was only $537,000. So where did the remaining three million dollars go? A third of it was spent on salaries and wages; another third was spent on "Operating" (whatever that means) and the remaining third was spent on wishy-washy things like "Travel" and "In-Kind Expenses".

So, here's why I believe it is a bad idea to donate to Wikipedia:

1. All of Wikipedia's content is created at no cost to them. The editors are volunteers. The administrators are volunteers. So, your money won't go to the people that actually make Wikipedia worth visiting.
   
   
2. Instead, your money will go to paying Wales's high salary and allow him to gallavant around the world on your dime.
   
   
3. WikiMedia claims that some of the money goes for paying programmers to maintain the Wiki software. I think there are tons of volunteers that would do this for free, since it is open-source. Paid programmers are not necessary.
   
   
4. You won't actually be "saving" Wikipedia. Wikipedia will never go away, even if they ran out of money.
   

That last one is the key point for me. Assume that nobody donated to Wikipedia, and the website closed up shop tomorrow. It would probably take less than a week before a big company like Google or Yahoo or Microsoft opens up a copy of Wikipedia, with all the same content. $537,000 in hosting? They can afford that in their sleep. Maybe they'll need to throw some simple ads on the page to make it profitable, but what webpage doesn't have ads these days, anyway?

Simply put: The WikiMedia foundation is expendable. Wikipedia will live on. There's already a ton of sites that mirror every page on Wikipedia, for free.

I know I'm simplifying the issues here, and that the WikiMedia Foundation does a lot of things that can't be easily replicated by Google/etc. I'm just saying, they could probably do the same thing with a lot less money (and a lot less whining for money).

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If you've never heard of it, Dan Walsh's excellent site, Garfield minus Garfield is an excellent read. I've been reading it for a while, and I noticed that he always seems to choose comics that work really well without Garfield.

I decided to try my hand at making my own "garfield-free" comics. Enjoy!














Hmm, maybe those aren't all that great. Alright, well, what about "Garfield Minus Jon Arbuckle"?



Hmm... maybe not. I think I'm going to let Dan Walsh do the heavy lifting.


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UPDATE

I've had the opportunity to interview David Thorne, where he explains what happened to cause the book problem. Read it here:

Reddit, Repercussions and Relatives - An Interview with David Thorne
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