Best Buy says their pricing error online is somehow my fault

Last night, Best Buy’s website had a pricing error. Certain $200 gift cards were for sale at $15. Naturally, people were buying tons of cards and for a brief moment, that was the big talk online. I bought 10 cards thinking that if it went through, I would have $1,000 in Best Buy spending money. Of course, I knew it was an error and expected that Best Buy would cancel the order. They have a right to do so.

Today, they officially canceled my order but the reason they gave was odd. They said that they canceled it because they couldn’t verify my information? What? Somehow my information was so inaccurate they couldn’t verify it? They won’t even admit that they had an error and they had to cancel it because of their own mistake.

Shame on you Best Buy. Grow some balls and take the blame.

EDIT: They emailed me this today 7/17/15

21st Century Hustle

Bought two tickets to a concert in Michigan for $183.90

I posted it on StubHub and two days later, I sold it for $225.82

+$41.92#Hustle

— Sam (@phutmasterflex) October 17, 2014

Those were Fleetwood Mac tickets I just bought. Pretty quick turnaround.

I got four tickets for The Who in Oakland in 11 months. Also have four more for The Who in LA in 11 months also. Saving one ticket for myself. So eight total tickets which I can also hopefully turn into profit.

For the LA one, if I sell them at the price I have them now, I will pay for my one ticket plus have about $30 in my pocket to buy some merchandise. Score!

What a very exhausting weekend of fun

On Friday I met with some outta town friends for a late dinner. We tried out this Tokyo fried chicken spot. Let me tell, you that place is good.

Following, we met up with other friends for some boba. Now that was fun.

The very next day, we spent 14 hours at Disneyland and California Adventure. I had never been to California before but it was a blast. I didn’t get a chance to see it all but I love that place. Too bad I don’t think I’d be going back there anytime soon. But it sure was memorable.

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I’m coming out for the LGBT community: A love letter from me

Go celebrate! I wouldn’t mind joining you!

Preface: This was something that had been stirring in my heart for the past couple weeks. I can’t pinpoint exactly why, but I felt that I needed to write this post… or at least put it out there. 

I am not actually gay. But having grown up in the Bay Area, having gay friends and really observing as an outsider, I wanted to share my thoughts on it. I haven’t been vocal about it in the past and part of it came because I wasn’t sure what to say. Now after some thinking, praying and reflection, I feel that at some level, I think I get it.  

I probably will get some negative responses to this and that’s fine with me. I might get positive ones too. This message comes from the heart and I write this out of love. 

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When I first even got a glimpse or an idea of what being gay might be, I was a kid. I didn’t know what it meant really. I just thought it was some kind of term you used to say someone was different. I distinctly remember calling Michael Jackson gay because he was different. I don’t think it was necessarily the fact that he was very pale and sounded like a woman to me, but I just felt that being gay just meant you were different. I might have used it as an insult like this as a kid, but I never really believed it. I had no problem with it, really. It didn’t affect me, so it wasn’t my problem.

That mentality has stuck with me my entire life. I didn’t see it affecting my life, so I didn’t really deal with it. (When Prop 8 came around, I didn’t speak out for or against it. I don’t even remember if I voted.) Despite the fact that I grew up in the Bay Area, went to school with gays, it never really meant anything to me. Maybe because I was used to it. Maybe because I was never scolded or told how to feel about it. It wasn’t my life, so I just let it be.

Understanding people who are misunderstood because they’re so different and just like me

Growing up, we disliked bullies. But if we understood what they were going through, would we view them differently?

Yesterday I was at the Rose Bowl Parade and I started to observe the people there. I tend to do that a lot when I am around a lot of people. It’s not something I do to judge, but rather this is my opportunity to see how the world of different people and how they interact with each.

Also, I like to observe people because a part of me has always had the heart for people who are misunderstood. The thing about it is that as I grew up, mainly during my college years, I interacted with a lot of different people. Part of my upbringing at that time as a college ministry leader was to understand that there are ways to reach out to people. How could I reach to them if I don’t understand them? Because of that, God taught me that everyone is different and I can’t generalize anyone.

I grew passionate for taking care of people who were on the street. Most people I have met wouldn’t get near the homeless. I prefer to give them hugs. I spent a lot of time with them and got to know their stories. Yes, some cases are because they are lazy. But so many more are because they were born into a bad situation or even the lowest paying jobs refuse to hire a homeless. The system isn’t as good as we’d like to think.

Let’s go have an adventure in Palm Springs

Into the mouth of a T-Rex like Pee Wee Herman!

With a day off from work, I went to go see my friend Ryan who lives two hours away in Palm Springs. It’s a mini Hollywood with a huge old people and gay community. It’s nice but not a place I would like to live in. But there were some pretty cool things that we did.

I got there at noon and we ate at Tyler’s Burgers. SOLID burger with lots of meat. Very delicious and I am glad that we ate there.

Following, we took some pictures with status like Sonny Bono, Lucille Ball and Marilyn Monroe.

CHECK OUT THE PHOTOS HERE

And what made this so exciting was that it was just a small little place in the middle of nowhere that had a lot of little shops going around. I liked it.

A weekend in which I ate a lot, watched the A’s win and moved like Bernie

What’s this? Yes, that’s me and my friend Chris doing the Bernie when he came to visit me last weekend. It was an idea that came up last month and today we finally put it into action.

But how did this all come to be? Let me take you down my weekend adventure in which I also ate a lot of good food and went to Anaheim to represent the A’s.

Recapping my weekend back in the Bay Area

Yeah, we fresh!

I love the Bay. It’s my home. It’s my upbringing. It’s what I am about. So this past weekend I was lucky enough to have some time off work and fly up back home. I had the entire trip planned surrounded by food and baseball.

Here’s a recap of all the fun that I had, including how I was able to meet up with a lot of really important peoples in my life.

FRIDAY: The journey to LAX was time consuming. I wasn’t going to drive to the airport and park my car there for three days. So instead, I decided to take public transportation. I had to walk up and down a hill for about a mile to get to the bus stop. I took the bus ($1.50) to the Union Station in downtown. There, I took the FlyAway bus directly to the airport ($7).

During the ride to the airport, I got a chance to really relax on the bus. It was like one of those vacation tour buses and it was comfortable. I even got a chance to read this very awesome article about Rick Ross in Rolling Stone magazine.

The most painful and best memory bobblehead I’ve gotten

I am an A’s fan and you all know that. But I am also a fan of baseball history, so when this bobblehead was released, I knew I had to get it. Even though Gibson’s homer was against the A’s, the actual homer itself was a moment that was a major staple in baseball history. That moment helped me become a baseball fan.

So even though it hurts me to look at this and remember what it meant to the A’s, it’s good baseball history. All I had to do is go to Bellflower via Craig’s List and meet a stranger in a dark lit neighborhood. But he was cool and is a bobblehead guy too and has lots of Dodgers ones. These Dodgers bobbles out this year are pretty cool. Already gonna get this year’s Fernando and Scully. Oh baby!

I like this bobble. Good and bad memories at the same time. Baseball is love.

Why does my bathroom smell so bad? Because of the Chinese culture clash

No TOILET paper in the TOILET? We should call it trash paper.

Yeah, you saw that sign right. That’s what the landlady has put up above the toilet in the bathroom of the house. I scratched my head about it but instead of asking her about it, I went to Google to find out about it.

This isn’t the first time that I’ve heard about people not flushing their toilet paper. An old roommate of mine used to do that in his household. I laughed at him when he thought about doing it at Da Crib (my old place in college) and told him that he better flush.

Through Google, I found out that it’s cultural. Mexicans do it and Chinese people do it. But it didn’t make sense? Why? Apparently in those countries, the toilets are not as strong and therefore toilet paper could clog it all up. So to avoid that, they throw their toilet paper into the trash.