These people did…

A Wal-Mart worker died after being trampled when hundreds of shoppers smashed through the doors of a Long Island store Friday morning, police and witnesses said.

The 34-year-old employee, a temporary maintenance worker, tried to hold back the unruly crowds just after the Valley Stream store opened at 5 a.m.

Witnesses said the surging throngs of shoppers knocked the man down. He fell and was stepped on. As he gasped for air, shoppers ran over and around him.

You can read the full story here.

I’ve read other reports about how no one stopped to help any of those who had fallen.  People just pushed away workers who were trying to get to their fallen co-worker, jostled and pushed police and paramedics trying to administer CPR— and people just kept coming in, shopping like nothing happened.  They didn’t even leave when asked to by police.

People can be so absolutely pathetic!

Wal-Mart shares the blame.  They should have anticipated the crowds and taken appropriate crowd control measures.  It wouldn’t have taken a rocket scientist to figure out that a crowd stampede was a more than likely scenario in this situation.

I’ve installed a new statistics collection program called FireStats.  Bots (good and bad) and various search engines are skewing the numbers and the program I was originally using (Counterize) didn’t have adequate referrer/URL/IP filtering capabilities.

I’ve updated FireStats to use the current hits/visitor numbers collected by the original program.  You can see the new stats program at work in the far right sidebar at the very bottom.  The difference between the two should be informative and somewhat disappointing.

While the hits as measured by Counterize are most likely accurate, the true visitor count is inflated.  I’m expecting to see lower but more realistic visitor numbers.

I may have jumped the gun on transferring the majority of my characters over to Volkmar.

Volkmar’s numbers looked good, but after perusing the Volkmar server forums, it appears that the quality of the community there is somewhat lacking.  The fact that one of the more recent forum threads involve  Volkmar residents griping about how much players on Volkmar  (and the server overall) suck, doesn’t help matters.

This just goes to show you that numbers aren’t everything.  So now my low-levels are trapped on Volkmar with an (apparently) crappy community.  Super.  At least I had the foresight to not transfer my two highest level characters just yet.

Listening to the more active and dedicated guildies talk, it appears that Badlands or Ungrim are two of the better choices for players leaving Bretonnia and most of the guilds have left for one or the other.

It’s too bad I trapped my other character classes on Volkmar.  I’m really not looking forward to starting from scratch for my other character classes.

I’m kicking myself for stranding my Bright Wizard on Volkmar because I took great effort leveling up her Apothecary and Cultivating skills.  She was my potion factory.  Now I’ll have to create and level up a new character on Badlands/Ungrim for that duty.  Ugh!

Just got the word today upon logging into Warhammer Online that our server, Bretonnia, has now been designated as a “low population” server.

In an effort to address a general population imbalance that tends to favour the forces of Destruction (and to cut costs I’m sure) Mythic has been channeling players as it selectively prunes the server tree.

This is a big hassle since mail and items that are currently in the in-game postal service will be lost.  For a lot of players (myself included), this means dealing with hundreds of items in postal transit spread out among multiple characters.  (Edit: Just finished transferring/selling off all my in-transit items! Phew!)

I’m thinking I’ll be heading to the Volkmar server as that has the best ratios (such as they are) out of the server choices offered for Bretonnia emigrants:

Volkmar Server Statistics (Waralytics.com)

These numbers are from Waralytics so they’re not completely accurate due to limits in non-official server data collection but they are sufficient for making a fairly informed choice.

Destruction still has a numerical advantage on Volkmar but it’s not as big an advantage compared to Badlands, Ungrim, Gorfang and Ironfist.   Hell, on Gorfang, Destruction has a nearly 2:1 advantage over Order.

So anyway, it’s off to Volkmar I go!

Some people will never learn…

Nude pics in phone lost at McDonald’s get online

FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. (AP) - Here’s some food for thought: If you have nude photos of your wife on your cell phone, hang onto it.

Phillip Sherman of Arkansas learned that lesson after he left his phone behind at a McDonald’s restaurant and the photos ended up online. Now he and his wife, Tina, are suing the McDonald’s Corp., the franchise owner and the store manager.

The suit was filed Friday and seeks a jury trial and $3 million in damages for suffering, embarrassment and the cost of having to move to a new home.

The suit says that Phillip Sherman left the phone the Fayetteville store in July and that employees promised to secure it until he returned.

Manager Aaron Brummley declined to comment, and other company officials didn’t return messages.

This actually cuts both ways.  If the employees promised to secure the phone and they leaked the information (very possible with dumbass teens these days) then they’re liable for spreading those images and are culpable.  They’re as equally as stupid as the cell phone’s owner.