IS TROPICAL – THE GREEKS (official music video) from EL NINO on Vimeo.

In the past couple of weeks, I’vre had some major breakthroughs thanks in part to Luigi at FingerArts.com. He’s helped me in figuring out some of the little intricacies in the code that makes the app run differently on jailbroken devices as opposed to non-jailbroken ones. Sometimes the little things can be a big pain.

Anyway, I’ve fixed a few major bugs that prevented people from properly being able to use Mangler. I’ve also forked the project to Github.com now so it’s easier for other iOS developers to get. Feel free to push fixes if you’re a dev who is looking to help. I’m still learning obj-c so my own personal fixes are slow going.

I’ve also moved the Mangler app to ModMyi’s repo as it will reach more people. Since it was on my own personal repo, I’ve had approximately 75 people download it in the past 3 months. It has now been on ModMyi’s repo for about a month and the download count is already up to 3,775. Not bad huh.

City Places Restrictions on Fire Department Response

HOPKINS COUNTY, KY—As of the beginning of this week, June 1st, the City of Madisonville and Mayor David Jackson have announced that the Madisonville Fire Department will no longer be among the first responders at the scene of a vehicular accident with injuries.

“In an effort to make our operations more efficient, we changed the response requirements for 10-46s, which are accidents with injuries,” said Mayor Jackson. “Instead of an immediate response by all of the fire department, and all the big trucks rolling out every time there’s any kind of vehicle accident, we wait until we have a police officer or first responder on-site. He or she will immediately assess the situation, and if there’s a potentially hazardous spill, if someone’s trapped, or if there’s any need for the fire department, they will immediately contact the fire department. It’s now at the discretion of the first responder; they will make the call as to whether or not the fire department needs to be dispatched.”

In regard to why the change was made and what benefits he believes the city will see as a result, Mayor Jackson said, “We hope this helps to conserve resources. With the price of fuel continuing to go up, we are trying to reduce fuel costs, and we also hope to lower the cost of fixing wear and tear on the fire department’s high cost trucks. This will also help to increase the safety of the general public by reducing the amount of trucks going through intersections for every vehicle accident. We just think it’s a much better use of our resources.”

Though the alteration to citywide 10-46 response requirements did not require approval from the Madisonville City Council, Mayor Jackson did explain that he presented the idea to each of the council members. After receiving their support, Mayor Jackson and the City of Madisonville put the change into effect on June 1st.

At this time, Chief Steven K. Stoltz and other members of the Madisonville Fire Department have not released any official comments on the amendment.

If you would like to submit your opinion on this matter for publication in a later article, please email iSurf News at luke@isurfnews.com or at news@isurfnews.com.

Finally…. the CDC posts some useful information. In an effort to bring emergency preparedness to the forefront of our minds, the Center for Disease Control (CDC) has posted a new article regarding being prepared in a Zombie ridden world! While it pokes fun at the horror genre in general, it really is a good read. you can read the entire article here.

http://emergency.cdc.gov/socialmedia/zombies_blog.asp

Anyway… back to my original post. I’ve pretty much decided on a Nikon M-223 2-8×32 BDC. Right now Nikon is offering a free M223 mount with the purchase of an eligible scope.

Now, free should be… well FREE! This doesn’t appear to be the case with Cals Sporting Armory though. I initially looked at the page shown in the pic below and thought about how wonderful a deal is for that scope with a free m-223 mount! However, if you read the fine print in the bottom box, you have to click another link to get the free scope. So, I clicked that link and what did I find? Seems like the old switcheroo.

You can see in the picture above that the MFG PART# is the same, the UPC# is the same and even the Stock Status is the same. What’s different though is the price… or to be exact the “Sale Price”.

The difference between the two ‘packages’ is $66.98. So, it would appear that the ‘free’ scope isn’t really free after all. In fact, it really looks like you’re paying $66.98 for a mount with a $99.95 retail price. While receiving a $32.98 (essentially 1/3) discount on a scope mount is good, when you look at the bigger picture… FREE is still not free.

Sounds like false advertising to me. Either that or fraud, if they’re getting reimbursed by Nikon. I’ll be contacting Cal’s about this and will comment soon.

UPDATE 1: I just received the following email from Cal’s Sporting Armory

Hello,

The Nikon M-223 scopes are offered two ways on our site. Nikon is running a promo that offers a free scope mount. The Nikon promo is no real deal, all they did was jack up the dealer price and thus the retail price on the package. Our normal price on these M-223 scopes is lower than their promo offer. We buy the scopes two ways… just the scope and then their promo offer with the so called free mount, so that’s why the scopes are offered two ways on our site.

The Nikon promo deal will save you money if you want their M-223 mount. Most of our customers don’t want to use the Nikon mount, so they don’t buy the Nikon promo package they buy the scope offered without the mount and then by the mount they want to use… like the American Defense Ad-Recon-1 mount.

–

I’ll surely be contacting Nikon next to see what’s up with that!

UPDATE 2: Still no email response from Nikon. 16:45 CDT 2011-05-17

UPDATE 3: Well… I got a response, but not an answer yet. Looks like I’m going to get shuffled around some.

Subject
Free Nikon M-223 mount?
Discussion Thread
Response Via Email (Ed S.)	05/20/2011 02:37 PM
Dear Mr. Buskov:  We have forwarded your email to Sport and Recreational Optics (SRO) at our headquarters in New York. Sincerely, Ed

UPDATE 4: I actually got a response survey about my ‘service experience’. Since My question hasn’t been answered… I really don’t have much positive to say.

Hey Giz…. you guys listening to your readers yet?!