Profound Canon Powershot S50 support advice

Canon's support site has terrible navigation and session management, but at least their support instructions are funny! This is from the Canon PowerShot S50 support section. Unfortunately, I can't link to it, because they require you to establish a session, and post a form, just to retrieve basic product help. Way to go, idiots!

What to do when the camera does not turn on
Please check the following things when the camera does not turn on.
Possible causes and how to handle them
1. The camera is not on
Turn on the camera. (Operation procedure varies between camera models. Please refer to the camera user guide supplied with your camera.)

Oh, so the reason the camera won't turn on is because it's not on? And the solution is to turn it on? Thank you, Canon support, I hadn't tried that yet!

There were a few other tips on that page as well, but I couldn't stop laughing about the first one, and then struggled to figure out how to link to the page, so I haven't gotten around to reading them yet. I hope the other suggestions are equally amusing, or better yet, USEFUL.

Counterproductive ads

Every day I hear ads on the radio that make me change the station. It makes me laugh when I think about how a company paid the radio station some money to repeatedly air an ad, which is so abnoxious to me that the company, the radio station, and all of the station's other advertisers lose a listener (and I would assume many others) every time the ad airs.

So, by playing these ads, not only will I never buy anything from the company, but I'm either switching to competing radio stations (until they play this type of ad), or listen to a CD. Now, the competing radio stations are probably not really competitors, since Clear Channel probably owns all of them, but when I listen to a CD it certainly doesn't help any of these companies.

Ads that grate on my nerves and make me want to go postal:
Shaw's Jewelers - painfully annoying singing, same singer and basically the same song for *at least* 7 years now, and I've been switching the station every single time I hear the first note for all of those years. When I have to buy jewelry someday, I will go anywhere except for this place, because they've been trying to torture me for so long.

Adelphia high-speed internet - abnoxious, infectious music.. some kind of wind instrument is the prominent and annoying sound. All it takes is one note from that instrument to make me switch the station. What's worse is that they're trying to torture me, but their service is something that's confined to particular geographic areas, which do not include my house. So I couldn't use their service even if I didn't hate them for their annoying ads.

Those are the two that have been pissing me off the most in the past week, since I started thinking about the phenomenon they cause (me changing station) and the repercussions that causes for the stations and their other advertisers. Of course there are always annoying ads everywhere, but certain ones just really get to me.

Safeway and Wind Energy

As I was getting gas last night at the new Safeway Fuel gas station in Bristow, VA, I noticed a sign posted saying that Safeway Fuel stations run on 100% Wind-generated electricity. How odd, I thought, for a petroleum dispenser to run off natural energy sources. Sounds good in theory, though. Seems like it's a good idea to use renewable, natural energy sources whenever possible, so I went ahead and checked out the website that was posted on the sign.

I wondered how they could get electricity from a different place than every other home, business, etc. around. It's not like there are any huge windmills in the vicinity, and it wouldn't be feasible to run a direct electric line from wherever they DO have huge windmills to this little gas station. According to the Safeway Green Power FAQ, they pay for the wind energy facilities to deliver an amount of electricity to the electricity grid (the power delivery grid that everyone is connected to), equal to the amount of electricity used by all of the Safeway Fuel stations, corporate offices, and San Francisco Stores.

I hope others will follow their lead, unless there's some negative aspect of this that their information website is neglecting to mention. I didn't find anything negative with a quick google search, though. For now, I'm just happy that they built a gas station closer to my house, which often has the cheapest gas around (especially with a 3 cents/gallon discount with your Safeway card, or a 6 cents/gallon discount with a prior grocery purchase of $50 or more). Not bad.