RSS FeedBest Buy-100: Me-0
Well, once again Best Buy has defeated me. Last night after I left there I thought it was me who won this round… But alas, I was mistaken. Here’s what happened.
A few weeks ago one of my video cards decided it was time to die. On the way home from work I decided I had lived long enough with only 2 monitors and headed on over to Best Buy to pick up a new video card. In my mind I was 100% certain that the card that died was an AGP card. When I arrived at the video card isle I found that they had only 1 AGP card. I don’t mean 1 “type” of card, I mean they had one lonesome AGP card TOTAL. It was more than I wanted to spend ($139.99), but I caved to the pressure of not wanting to drive around town to find a cheaper one. I bit the bullet, picked up the box and headed out.
When I went through the check-out line I was very pleasantly surprised when the card rang up at $45.99. No, I didn’t bother to tell the girl with multi-colored nail polish that it was supposed to be nearly 3 times that amount. Instead I gleefully sprinted from the store before they could realize their mistake. Bwhahahaha! I won!
Or so I thought.
When I got home I took apart the machine and before I could do remove the old card I needed to use an air blower to remove the half inch of dust that was caked on every flat service in the case. I then removed the dead card and set it aside. I unwrapped the new card and that’s when it hit me. The slot is not AGP. It’s PCI Express. I’m fairly certain I heard Best Buy laughing at my right then. I checked my back to see if they had stuck a “Gotcha” sign to me on my way out the door.
This afternoon I went to return the wrong card and purchase the right one. When I entered the store nobody pointed or stared, but I know they wanted to! I went to the return counter and the nice girl behind the counter asked if anything was wrong. I thought about explaining how Best Buy always wins and this was just another case of me being the victim, but instead I just told her I was a bonehead and got the wrong card. I went back to the video card isle and found that the least expensive PCI Express card they carry is $79.99. My only hope is that it rings up incorrectly, too. I returned to the counter and sure enough I was hit with the news that I owed an additional $36 bucks. I paid the balance and slunk away in defeat.
As I exited the store, the guy who removed the security chip from the box said, “Nice try sir, maybe next time.”
At least that’s what I heard.
Love/Hate: American Gladiator Style
As a kid I totally loved watching the American Gladiators. I was excited to see that it was coming back on after 14 years off the air. Excited for a couple reasons. I knew it was going to be fun to watch with my son. He’s fairly close to the age I was when the show was on originally and I knew the show would be right up his alley. I wasn’t wrong. We watched every episode of the first season together. We cheered, rooted and booed the contestants and gladiators every Tuesday afternoon (Tivo’d from the night before).
Last night was the first episode of the second season. For some reason, instead of waiting until this evening to watch the show with my son, my wife and I watched it. They have a few new events, a revamped “Eliminator” course that’s tougher than last season and a few new gladiators, including last year’s American Gladiator winners.
As we started watching the show, a few things started annoying me. First off, as they introduce the new contestants, at least one of the female competitors cries during their intro interview. Do all women immediately start to cry when they say the words, “I was a single mother?” Then, before each event Hulk Hogan and/or Laila Ali ask the contestants how they are going to take on the next challenge. Their answers are always an uncomfortable mix of forced-excitement and bad clichés. To be fair, the voice-over guy does have a few amusing lines from time to time, but they are the exception.
My wife put it best when she said, “I’d enjoy watching this so much more if we put it on mute.” So, we tried it. She was right. It was far more enjoyable to watch the show with no sound.
I’m going to go back to waiting for Tuesday’s to watch the show with my son. Hopefully his enjoyment of the show will spill over and cover for the parts of the show that irk me.
The Painful Side of Social Webbing
There are so many social network sites these days that it’s almost impossible to keep active on all of them. I have, or have had accounts on just about all of them. But, the list of sites I stay active with is very very short.
Today I logged in to Facebook to find that I had a new friend request. By photo alone, I had no idea who the person was. I followed the link to their profile and it was clear that they only requested to by my friend for the sole purpose of padding their friend count and to eventually send me ads at some point down the line. I spend more time on social network sites doing this than I do actually staying in touch with long distance friends & family members. It’s for this exact reason that I deleted my account on MySpace just last week.
With Facebook, the thing that has the biggest ability to waste your time is the massive amounts of third party applications that are available. Rate movies, rate your friends, movie quotes and surveys, before you know it you’ve spent two hours telling people how much you loved the movie Weekend at Bernie’s. A while back I made a choice to remove any of the apps that are time-sucks and I will ignore all requests from friends to add new ones. If you’re a contact of mine on Facebook and I ignore your request, please don’t be upset. I’m just trying to save my sanity.
I’ve found that I no longer have much interest in keeping up with any of my social network accounts. I’ll keep my Facebook and LinkedIn accounts, but it’s VERY unlikely that I’ll join any new ones. I’m much happier using my blog here, my photo blog at slackerphotos.com, my twitter account to let everybody know what I’m up to. I then use netvibes.com to read close to 70 RSS feeds. I also use Twirl to follow a few dozen other people’s tweets (a post on twitter is referred to as a ‘tweet’).
If you haven’t already checked out twitter, I strongly suggest it. I realized something about twitter the other day that has really increased it’s usefulness for me. As you may know, I’ve taken up photography as a hobby recently. While checking out some photos on flickr.com, I found a link to a photographer’s blog. When I checked it out, I saw that he also was active on twitter. I started following his tweets. Then, I checked out the list of people he followed. I went through his list and found 5 or 6 other photographers to start following. Also, when checking out their twitter profiles I found links to their photo blogs. Some of them are absolutely amazing. So I add those to my RSS feed list on Netvibes. Now when these people post a tweet or a blog post with a juicy tip, I’m being spoon-fed information on how to improve as a photographer. I have to say that’s better than any class I could possibly think to enroll in. Not to mention being 100% totally free.
Be careful that your social webbing isn’t eating up all your time and not providing you with any benefits. Don’t forget that your time is valuable.
An expensive week
Why is it when something expensive happens, something else expensive usually likes to follow right behind? Or, in the case of this past week, expensive comes in threes.
I don’t know how many of my loyal readers know that my son had eye surgery when he was really young and wore for a few years. He had a lazy eye that seemed to get better over time. After some time wearing the glasses, his eyes got better and he no longer had to wear glasses.
Fast forward to last week. Paxton’s eyes have been going back to their old ways. He had an eye appointment and it was determined that he once again needs glasses. New frames and lenses to the tune of $450. Ouch.
Next it’s time for Chris to go for an MRI on her shoulder. She has been in considerable pain recently and one of the doctors she’s seen recently thinks that she may need surgery. Another doctor thinks that she has a tear that may just need some time to heal. Hopefully the MRI will show that she doesn’t need surgery.
When it came time to pay for the MRI, the gal behind the counter said, with a straight face, $450. Ouch again! I have no idea why our insurance didn’t cover more of this. I’m going to have to resubmit the claim and see if they’ll reimburse us for some of that. Brutal.
As if that wasn’t enough, let’s talk about the enjoyment of home ownership. A couple years back we replaced our air conditioning units. Talk about sticker shock. Well, when you purchase brand new units, you would assume that you will go at least a few years without requiring repairs, right? Right? Wrong! Shortly after having them installed we ended up having to have one of them replaced. That was on their dime, so I didn’t care too much. However, when we had the company out last week to figure out why our upstairs unit was blowing nothing but warm air, he gave us two options: replace the compressor (no charge} or, replace the unit ($700). The $700 being the cost of renting the crane and what-not, but damn, that’s a lot of coin. So after some debate, we went ahead and opted for the free route. I’m fairly certain this will come back to bite me in about 4 years, but really, who knows where any of us will be in 4 years.
And finally, the garage door. Our garage door opener has been acting up lately. On Friday we made an appointment to have the opener replaced on Monday. The new opener plus installation was going to cost us $250. Thanks to being home sick, I was able to see when the installer pointed out that not only was the opener itself dead, but one of the springs had also snapped. Go ahead and add an additional $260.
So there ya go. The joys of home ownership and medical bills. There is NEVER a good time for unexpected expenses. But why does it always seem to happen at what feels like the worst possible time?
Procrastination builds excitement
This summer we are planning on taking a cruise to Alaska. For our trip, one of the things we need to do is get our passports. It seems odd to say we need passports to go to Alaska, but the ship sets sail out of Vancouver, Canada. And in the post 9-11 days, even our friends to the North require you to have a passport.
Back in December we headed on out to the post office, filled in all the paperwork, paid our money and sent off our applications. 3 short weeks later we received 3 passports and one rejection letter. Looks like Chris and the kids are going to Alaska without me. (over dramatic much?)
Why was I rejected you ask? No, I’m not a felon. No, I’m not being hunted by any government agency. The reason is because I changed my name when I turned 18 (long story behind it, don’t ask.) Apparently there are 2 ways to do that; the right way, and the way I did it, naturally.
Since I never changed my name through the courts, they required that I send a bunch of extra documents in order to prove I’ve been using my current last name for over 5 years. No problem, I can get that taken care of in no time. But, I didn’t. December gave way to January. Along came (and went) February and most of March. Then, one day my wife says, “Our trip is in 2 months. If you don’t have your passport, you can’t go.” Can you say wake-up call? Yeah, me too.
I took half a day off work last week and we gathered up a stack of documents proving I am who I say I am and we headed back to the post office. Since I had waited so long to return I had to re-apply from the beginning rather than riding in on the coattails of my previous application. That basically means I had to pay the 100 bucks again. I also paid extra to have the application expedited. Once we got it mailed off all we could do then was wait and hope it got approved quickly. 8 short days later, our answer came in the mail. Chris called me and says, “I can’t wipe the smile off my face. Your passport just arrived in the mail.” Woo hoo, I get to go to Alaska after all.
Such a huge amount of stress has been lifted from my shoulders. I would love to say that I have learned my lesson and next time I have a deadline to do something I will get it taken care of right away instead of waiting until the last minute. But, as you may have guessed, that’s just not in my nature and wouldn’t be nearly as exciting.
I need to work on that
It has become apparent that I need to work on the way I respond to people when I’m a slight bit agitated. It seems I have pissed off (and hurt feelings of) a few people that I love recently with the way I reacted to a seemingly infinitesimal event. Some details, if you please.
This afternoon I went to pick up sandwiches for lunch. When I returned my mom was in the dining room using using her computer. The kids were upstairs and Chris was working with something in the kitchen. The TV was on in the (currently deserted) living room. I set the bag of sammys on the dining room table and Chris came in and started sorting out the wrapped-up goodies. I grabbed mine and headed to the living room. As I sat down I reached for the remote control and quickly changed the station away from some modeling reality show on MTV that I have never seen before and, as far as I know, it’s a show that nobody in my household watches. 5 seconds after I changed the channel, it became abundantly clear that my mom and wife had been watching the show. It’s at this point in the story where things are up for interpretation. I clicked a button on the remote to take us back to the previous station and said something to the effect of, “there was nobody watching the show.” My exact words and tone were likely a bit harsher than that, stemming from the manor in which I was informed of my wrongdoing.
See, in my mind, I felt as if I was jumped on for changing the channel. In their minds, I snapped back unkindly and in a bit of a pouting fashion. The end result being, my mom left the room upset and my wife and I sat and ate lunch silently while watching a TV show that neither of us had any interest in watching.
Now, like I said, this whole scene should have been a complete non-event. Honestly, going back and watching the modeling show was certainly not going to kill me. But what does bother me is that both my mom and wife were upset with me over something so ridiculously insignificant.
This isn’t about assessing blame. Quite the contrary. It’s about figuring out what I could have done differently in order to avoid the situation in the future. I believe the proper course of action would have been to say, “Oops, sorry about that. Here, let me change the channel back” while at the same time keeping all hints of sarcasm and bitterness out of my voice.
It would be all to easy for me to just say, “Yeah, well if they hadn’t jumped on me for changing the channel, I wouldn’t have snapped back at them.” But really, what will that solve? Or, I could this, “If I had asked if anybody were watching the show before turning the channel, none of this would have happened.” Hey, that sounds better. Unfortunately, I’m more likely to have the former go through my head than the latter. Yeah, I know, I need to work on that.
Consider this post part of my “working on it”.
The art of setting expectations
Setting people’s expectations is something that I think we all do all the time. At work I basically do it all day long. I set my boss’s expectations for how long a project is going to take and how much it’s going to earn. I set developers expectations for the workload I’m going to be handing off to them. I set advertisers expectations for the amount of traffic they are going to see for an offer. So on and so on. I set my wife’s expectations for when I plan to be home each night so that she can have a sense of when to start making dinner. Without setting expectations, well, nobody would know what to expect.
So what happens if you set expectations that are way off? Well, usually people end up getting upset at you. Tell your boss a project will be done on Tuesday and it’s not done until Friday… he’s upset. Tell your boss a project will earn $2500 a week and it ends up earning $300 a week, yep, upset again. Tell your wife you’ll be home for dinner at 5:00 and don’t show up until 8:00, you guessed it, upset.
I constantly try to set peoples expectations in ways that will always leave them satisfied. It goes right along with the saying, “under promise and over deliver”. If you tell your boss a project is going to be done on Thursday and it’s actually done on Tuesday, he’s going to be pleased. Tell your boss a project is going to earn $900 a week and it ends up earning $2500 a week, he’s pleased again. Tell your wife you aren’t going to be home until 7:30 for dinner but call her at 5:30 to say you got out early and are heading home, well, unless she’s shagging the pool boy and was counting on you being late, she’s probably going to be pleased as well.
This past Tuesday we got passes to see a sneak preview of the new Will Ferrell movie Semi-Pro. I’m a big fan of his movies, but I’ll be the first to admit that they can be hit or miss. Anchorman is one of my favorite movies, but Blades of Glory isn’t exactly a laugh a minute. When we went to see Blades of Glory in the theater, my expectations were pretty high and we walked away fairly disappointed in the movie. With Semi-Pro, however, my expectations were pretty low. I had seen several previews for it and my biggest fear was that I had already seen all the funny parts and the rest of the movie would just be filler. I can not stress enough how happy I am to be wrong on this one. First off, Will is so great at playing over-the-top characters. Even in Blades of Glory, I loved his character, the rest of the movie just wasn’t that good. But, in Semi-Pro, there are a bunch of great characters, funny scenes and a ton of quotable lines that I’m sure we’ll all be repeating for months and years to come. I’d have to rank the movie just under Anchorman as my second favorite Will Ferrell movie.
I’m a little concerned by the fact that one of Will’s next movie projects is Land of the Lost. But hopefully I’ll be pleasantly surprised at that one, too.
The not-so-perfect Valentine’s date
Ahh yes, Valentine’s Day. The holiday created by Hallmark and the florist industries. The holiday that probably causes more tension between couples than any other. After everything that happened yesterday, I can certainly see why.
Our dinner reservations were set for 8:30. I checked the movie schedule and saw that Juno was playing at about 10. But, since we had Chris’ mom hanging out with the kids we didn’t want to stay out too late, so we opted to go to the movies before dinner. No problem, there was a 6:00 showing. That would leave plenty of time to see the movie and make it to dinner. Done deal!
We leave the house at about 5:40 and arrive at the theater at 6:00 straight up. Perfect! We walk up to the ticket counter and find out that the movie times listed online were wrong. The movie didn’t start at 6:00. It started at 5:25. Shit. Our options for 6:00 movies were “Jumper” and “Meet the Spartans”. Chris didn’t know what Jumper was so she wasn’t sure she’d want to see it, so we went with Meet the Spartans. Wow, that movie was bad. I was expecting it to be just sillyness, which it is… but it’s really not all that funny. There are some funny things in it, but overall, I could have skipped it.
The movie was pretty short (probably the best thing I could say about it), so we ended up having PLENTY of time to drive to dinner. Since it was so cold last night we decided to just go directly to the restaurant and have a drink in the bar while we waited for our table.
We arrived at The Tillerman at about 7:50. We checked in with the girls at the front counter and they informed us that it would probably be 8:30 before we were able to be seated. We had expected that, so it was no big deal. The bar ended being PACKED so we found seats in the reception area instead. By about 8:20 we started hearing several people complaining about their reservation time having passed already. Ours did the same. At about 9:00 we finally got seated. Our waiter brought us some drinks and gave us the rundown of the lobster specials. We both ordered steaks (Filet Mignon for Chris, Porterhouse for me) and we ordered an appetizer of Spicy Thai Calamari (which were thankfully NOT that spicy). Our appetizer arrived a few minutes later and it was cold.Then a few minutes after that they served us our salad. They serve it on a Lazy Susan with several items around the outside for you to add to your salad. I requested some ranch dressing that our waiter told us was available but wasn’t on the Lazy Susan. After 5 minutes of waiting, I went ahead and used the Bleu Cheese. Then came the main course. I am fairly certain that I have never had a steak that had so little flavor.
When I am spending $140 on dinner for two, I expect to enjoy my meal. Hell, when I spend $50 for dinner, I expect to enjoy it. The thing is, if I spent $50 and didn’t like it, it wouldn’t have stung so much. Oh well, lesson learned. I will not be returning to The Tillerman. The thing that bums me out most about the dinner isn’t the money, it’s the fact that I could have gone to several other places and spend the same (or even less) on dinner and I know Chris and I would have both enjoyed our dinner much much more.
On the bright side, I have an awesome wife. For Valentine’s day she got me a hat that she had embroidered with geeeek.com and a hat that matches our softball team colors with my number (42) on it. She also bought me Guitar Hero 3 for xBox 360 WITH the wireless guitar. She is so awesome.
Despite the crappy movie and dinner, we still had a very nice time. When you spend time with good company, what’s going on around you doesn’t always matter.
Not exactly how I wanted to start the new year
This morning on my way to work I got pulled over for speeding. Apparently I was doing 28 MPH in a 15 MPH school zone. The crazy part is, I drive through that same school zone every day on my way to work. I’m a bit of a speed Nazi when it comes to school zones. So, I must have totally just spaced out this morning as I was driving through that area. The motorcycle officer didn’t pull me over right away. I was at least a mile away before he pulled up behind me at a stop light. I saw him in my rear view mirror and didn’t give it a second thought. Then, the light turns green and on went his lights. My jaw must have dropped open. I had zero idea why he was pulling me over. But, if he says I was speeding, I was probably speeding.
Care to guess what it costs to be pulled over for doing 28 in a 15 (school zone)? If you guessed $297, you’d be right. Ouch. That stings.
I was trying to remember back to when the last time I had been pulled over was. Well, I was pulled over a few months back for an expired registration, but didn’t get a ticket. But, the last time I got a moving violation was more than 10 years, and probably more like 15 years ago.
Man that sucked.
Fairly lazy weekend
This was a pretty low-key weekend. I don’t think I’m fully recovered after being sick last week. My energy has been totally zapped. Hopefully I’ll be back to normal in a day or two.
Saturday morning I went and played poker at Nevada Palace with a buddy. We had a last longer bet in the tournament with the loser buying lunch. I’m happy to say that I really enjoyed the lunch he bought me. Unfortunately I can’t say that I made any money in the tourney, though.
Saturday night was our monthly home poker tourney. I was only expecting to see about 10 people show up, but we ended up having 16 players. Not to shabby. Unfortunately (again) I didn’t make it in to the money in that tourney either. That doesn’t really bother me, but, the fact that I played really, really poorly does bother me a bit. There were times when I pretty much just gave up on playing for the money in the pot and didn’t stick with my normal attacking style. I’m sure if I had stuck to my normal style I would have at least done better than I ended up doing. Ahh well, there’s always next month…
This morning we woke up way too early. 5:30 to be exact. Today was the first day back with the Road Runners training group. Our buddy (and massage therapist) Dave is joining us for training, too. Today was mainly about getting signed up and just getting out for a little exercise. We ended up doing about a 40 minute walk. We jogged the last 5 minutes or so. I’m glad to be getting back out there for some exercise, but it was a little too cold and windy for my liking today. To figure out what our training schedule is going to be, we need to decide on a race to use as a target. We may use the Disney Half Marathon as our target.
After the walk we came home and took a 2 hour nap. Then, Dave came over and Chris and I both got massages. I really needed one. My back has been a bit of a mess lately and he really helped relieve the pain. While Chris was getting her massage, I slept for another 45 minutes. We then got up and had some lunch. I followed up lunch with another 2 hour nap.
This evening we were looking for something to watch on TV. Last week I Tivo’d the movie “You, Me and Dupree“, so we started watching that. After the first 5 minutes we started thinking it was bad. After 15 minutes, we had to turn it off. It was terrible and showed no signs of pulling out of the nosedive it was in. We ended up watching some old episodes of Cash Cab instead.
After Cash Cab was over, I saw that tonight was going to be the premier of the all new American Gladiator. I loved that show as a kid! I have been looking forward to watching the new one. The 2 hour premier was awesome. The new gladiators are over-the-top characters, and you can’t go wrong when one of the hosts is Hulk Hogan. The show is entertaining and I’m sure I’m going to end up watching them all.
I’m looking forward to getting to work tomorrow to see what the rest of the competitors in the Beard Off look like. I’m sure we are all going to look like we are homeless by the end of the week.