The greatest podcast in history is back. In text form.

I think I speak for all of Texas when I say this:

Hail is bullshit.

It weirds me out when people come to my house and connect to my WiFi.

I spent an hour typing gibberish into a command line, but my server is back to life. Yay computers.

Hi; I'm Rob. I buy mattresses on the internet.

Way back in January, I purchased a Casper mattress, hoping it would help with my back pain. I decided to keep a record of how I was doing, and #casper100 was born. I intended to go the full 100 days.

I made it to day 89.

The mattress feels like a quality mattress. It's just far too firm for me. In hindsight, I should have tapped out sooner. I had to contact Casper for a refund.

The pickup / refund process was as painless as they tell you. I contacted support, and a gentleman by the name of Luke was quick to respond. We found a date that worked for pickup, and right on schedule, the Salvation Army came by to pick up the mattress. I scanned the receipt, emailed it to Luke, and he processed the refund immediately.

It was really simple. I can't stress that enough. No hard sell - just "I understand; let me take care of this for you."

Casper is a company that I want to do business with. Their support is awesome. I have no problem recommending that people try them out. That is, IF they like mattresses on the firmer side. Hopefully they will expand their offerings at some point to cater to the softies out there.

As for me, I'm sleeping on a Novosbed. I have 120 days to see if this is the one.

It's probably against some rule to use an entire micropost as a block quote, but whatever.

We don't care how many words you've written or how many miles you've run or how many emails are in your inbox or how incredibly busy you are. Why do you constantly tell us those things ?

You already know this, but Smile changed their minds about the whole TextExpander as a service thing. I can only assume it was in response to my brilliant thoughts on the subject. You're welcome.

So anyway. It's all fixed now. Sort of.

TextExpander 5 for Mac and TextExpander 3 + Custom Keyboard, the most recent standalone releases of TextExpander, will continue to be supported, and available for sale.

Sounds great. Except it's probably not super reasonable to expect Smile to maintain two different versions of their apps forever. One of them will provide more income than the other, and one will get priority. Welcome to business.

In addition, Smile fixed their subscription pricing for current customers. Sort of.

You, and other current TextExpander customers, receive a 50% lifetime discount on the new TextExpander. This brings the yearly cost of the Life Hacker plan to $20, which is comparable to previous upgrade costs ($19.95).

Ok great. Now it's $20 per year. That doesn't sound unreasonable. But it still stops working the minute you stop paying. It's still a forever bill.

One last thing, and this is something I didn't even pay attention to earlier:

For TextExpander.com, snippet data is stored plain at rest with our database provider, Compose.io, an IBM company.

That's right - say you decide to add the forever bill and sign up with the fancy new TextExpander.com sync service. Your snippets live on TextExpander's servers in plain text. Let's hope you don't have any snippets with personal information, like addresses or phone numbers.

I don't want another forever bill. I don't want to trust Smile to keep my snippets in plain text on their servers. I don't want any of this, even if the price sounds perfectly reasonable on it's face. I'll keep using Old TextExpander until a future unnamed OS update breaks it, and then I'll decide if New TextExpander is worth the trade-offs.

He went out like only Kobe could. What an ending.

Filed under you wouldn't believe this this shit if I made it up, Volkswagen is considering cutting bonuses to its executives:

Volkswagen (VOWG_p.DE) may make significant cuts to bonuses for senior managers, people familiar with the matter said, in an attempt to resolve an internal dispute over executive pay following the diesel emissions scandal at the German carmaker.

It's not like the company recently had a colossal diesel engine scandal or anything. Go ahead and think about cutting those bonuses, VW.

Tonight at 9:30 PM, Kobe Bryant will take the court for the last time in his 20 year career.

I know what I'll be doing.