Mold ahoy, ecart aggravation, foursome

So yesterday I brought in one of the shoo fly pies to work to share with my co-workers.  I have told them about the mysterious pie many times but most had never seen/eaten one.  I had a slice with my coffee and other people tried it as well.  By lunch time it was half eaten.

During the afternoon I told another department about the pie, hoping to get it all consumed by days end.  Shortly after a few people sampled I heard worried voices approaching the door.  “you have to throw out that pie right now!” they say, it has MOLD!

She showed me her piece, in an air pocket at the bottom there was clearly mold growing on some molasses. Great.  We went in and looked at the pie and saw more mold in another air pocket.  Into the trash the pie went.

It was not very cool to present co-workers with moldy pie.  I told Ali about it and she was mortified.  She had given another two pies to the neighbors and she was afraid they were moldy too.  She later warned them to inspect the shoo fly’s carefully.

The 8 pies that Ali got had expiration dates that were a week apart.  Some were marked as expiring on Sept 24th, the others Oct 1st.  The mold pie was a 9/24 model.

Last night I pulled another pie out and cut it up, carefully inspecting it for mold, it was clean, it also was a 10/1 pie.  We have at least two more 9/24 pies in the freezer.  My plan is to do something similar to these, cut them apart and make sure they aren’t fuzzy inside before consuming them. Gross stuff huh?

I have been spending a lot of time in the past week or two working on a alternative credit card processing option for the running club.  My hope is if I can reduce the cost of accepting credit card entries from $3.25 per person down to less than a dollar. We can easily absorb that additional cost instead of charging the runner that fee, removing a hurdle to online registration for runners.

I have been able to set up an account with Google Checkout, and a Zencart shopping application pretty easily.  My main challenges were how to be able to export race registrations in a bulk manner and getting the two things to talk to each other. Zencart is an open source product.  Trying to nail down various issues requires a lot of Google searching.

Finally yesterday I got both issues mostly resolved.  I was able to buy a race in my store, have it processed in Google Checkout and have the purchase show up back in my store.  I was also able to generate a file that I would be able to import into the timing system.

Now I have to do some pretty extensive testing and tweaking to go through the checkout process and make sure it works even if someone does something dumb, which will surely happen.

This weekend is my sprint triathlon in Miami.  Last night Ali asked if I cared if Christy and Michelle stayed in the room with us, since it has a king size bed and a queen sofa bed.  Hmmm let me think about this, do I want to sleep with three women or not?  Of course I said I was fine with it. 🙂

Wow American Idol CATAPULTED over the shark with their new judge announcements, Jennifer Lopez and Steven Tyler, how lame.  That show is done.  I predict it goes no longer than two more seasons.