Picture this, you’re booking a family vacation months in advance through Orbitz and during your purchase flow, an option to protect your vacation package with trusted company Allianz Travel Insurance. Because you have a family and because you are booking the trip so far in advance and because it costs so much, you choose to buy the travel insurance too. The representation of the insurance policy is that if some act out of your control happens and you can’t take the trip, Allianz has you covered.

Now fast forward, mere days before the trip your family dog, a member of your family for over 10 years is viciously attacked by another dog requiring immediate medical attention and ongoing personal care. This is the time that you care for your family member and you make the difficult but correct choice to cancel your family vacation secure in the knowledge that you bought travel insurance for just this reason.

Now fast forward to the day you receive notice from Allianz that your claim will not be honored because you signed an “exclusionary policy” that does not cover pet emergency. You call their claim line and speak to Nicole and then Pat. Both empathize with your situation, but say there is nothing to be done. You realize now that you’ve been scammed because like 99% of other people, you didn’t read the 28 pages of fine print excluding the very emergency that caused you to cancel your trip.

No amount of common sense will penetrate the evil corporate facade that is Allianz – they wrote a contract and your emergency that you bought the insurance to cover is not in effect. You now not only have an injured dog, but you’ve lost your family vacation money because you trusted a company to honor the core aspect of what insurance is for, unexpected loss. All of that hurts, but it’s really the principle of the matter now and the negative consequence of not honoring an obligation to a customer that Allianz should suffer.

Make no mistake about it, Allianz Travel Insurance is a scam. It is rigged to take your money and provides you with little benefit. DO NOT BUY ALLIANZ INSURANCE. I will be reporting them to the California Insurance Commissioner for false advertising and will lobby that office to suspend Allianz’ ability to do business in California.

Furthermore, I would like to encourage the dog owners of America to opt out of insurance offered by Allianz. On an annual basis, that should account for about 5M of the 13M policies they write annually if everyone got the word (why would you buy it anyway since it doesn’t cover you.) Don’t let what happened to Gracie go without some positive benefit.

It’s clear that Allianz has no intent to pay claims when your trip is cancelled. Don’t give them the money. Meanwhile, I will also be contacting Orbitz today and suggesting to them that they can either a) get on the right side of this issue or b) gain inclusion in the next round of criticism on this issue. They are aiding and abetting (and profiting) from the Allianz Travel Insurance Scam.

If you follow computing at all, you might be familiar with the Raspberry Pi project. It’s a simple ARM processor mini computer. That is a computer that can run Linux on a board the size of a credit card and is power efficient enough to run on battery, yet is powerful enough to stream full 1080p video or allow one to play high resolution 1st person shooter games.

What’s my interest you might ask (after all, I am a software guy, not a hardware guy.) I have two reasons to be interested both related to the store. First, I think this compute platform may allow for a set of interactive displays in the store that previously were too expensive to contemplate on a capital and power expense basis. Secondly, I believe there could be an infinite number of projects/kits that could be assembled centered on the Raspberry Pi computer that we can offer in the store.

The downside of this is, it seems the whole tech world is waiting for these things and it’s going to take some time for the supply to even out relative to the demand. Good news for the project, bad news for people who want to get their hands on physical boards to do stuff with (like me.)

Back into the workshop later this morning after a week filled with paperwork. I love the tangible aspect of this project!

If you’ve been following our store journey, Oddyssea you might say 😉 you’ll know that we acquired a 1909 model #367 solid brass cash register. I thought that I would take on the restoration process until I got into a bit and it turns out not only to take time, but very specialized knowledge. While it would be fun to acquire that knowledge, we simply don’t have the time to invest in that single item.

We located the one, and I mean the one and only company (HBAC Group) that specializes in the repair and restoration of these machines and set about shipping the register out to have them get it back into shape. Here’s the catch, to have any reasonable shipping cost, the weight of the package cannot exceed 150 lbs (68 kg for you non-imperial measurement types.) It turns out the register on its own is 132 lbs. I managed to build a package around it that weighed 32 lbs on its own. For those of you keeping score out there, that’s a 164 lb package.

So I found myself back in the shipping store yesterday and removed my packaging to try to get the total weight under the limit while re-packaging the register in high-tech, lightweight materials and re-packaging securely enough that it won’t be destroyed during the shipping process. I think we managed to get that done and the thing is finally on its way east to Jasper, New York where it will get the love and attention it so badly needs before embarking on its new life at Oddyssea.

Dropped by the store this morning on my way to appointments in the South Bay and saw the finished floors, they look great! We’ve got one more drywall step today and then off to painting.

Yesterday we met with the folks from Terra Amico who build custom items from salvaged materials. Joe & Lisa have some fantastic things they’ve created, it’s well worthwhile to check out their Photobucket stream of completed projects. We’re very happy to have a chance to work with them on some of the fixtures for Oddyssea.

We’re getting really excited!

We posted this in the store window today…

Guess we’ve come out of the closet with the name. We still have much more to do. We don’t have any of the real creative work done yet; we’ll be embarking on that shortly.