Toys

06.12.2006

I've gotten some new toys lately. Well, not toys in the traditional sense - especially from someone like me who still prowls the toy aisle of Wal-Mart looking for new wrestling figures. Last Wednesday my new PC was delivered from Digital Storm (which is just a cool name for a business, regardless of what they do). It arrived without incedent, save for the 3 weeks I was waiting between the order being made and the parcel being delivered. I even got to spend some quality time at the end of the week and over the weekend setting it up and loading all of the little things that make life around the pc ever so much easier.

The pc went in the room in which I had new laminate flooring installed. I used to call all floors that looked like wood "hardwood" just out of upbringing and ignorance. I've since learned that there's a difference, although the things that actually make up the difference escape my memory at almost the same speed they enter. All I know is I've got a new floor. It's not real wood. It's not linoleum. It's not carpet. It's that other stuff.

This is also the week my diet has finally stalled out. Over the past week I've lost nothing for the first time in 3 months. Part of me thinks it's time to change the batteries in the scales. Normally I can get on and off the scales a coupole of times and the displayed weight is the same. Over the past couple of days I've tried stepping on, off, then back on again with variances of up to 4 pounds, and it's usually 4 pounds heavier! But I'm not depressed and about to go willy nilly at the Pizza Hut buffet. It's a plateau. It'll pass and I'll be on my way to losing the next 47 lbs in a jiffy. A willy nilly jiffy!

Hmmmm, Pizza Hut......

(Oddly enough, I don't really have a craving for anything I'm not "supposed" to be eating lately, which may be an odd side effect of my little plateau. I've just been craving chicken lately, but that's something I can have on this diet, so I don't think that counts as a bad craving)

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My Best Buy Online Shopping Experience

06.04.2006

I used to think of myself as a regular Best Buy customer. I would go there for computer equipment, software, video games, movies. If they had something I was in the market for, I would travel to my local Best Buy to best buy it. Over the years, the luster of the local Best Buy has waned. Their prices, when running a sale, are better than most for the quality of goods, but just barely.

Last week Best Buy was running a sale on all 10 seasons of Friends. I've always been a Friends fan, and it being my nature to collect shows and movies on the sweet binary flow of DVD, I've been biding my time for the right sale of the seasons of Friends to make my move. Best Buy was running as sale of $16.99 per season. My time to strike was ripe!

10:30 AM Tuesday I went to Best Buy and saw a big empty space where the seasons of Friends lived. Best Buy has become notorious over the years for playing the bait-n-switch to get you in the store, not have what they advertised on sale, and then screw you over on something else. Determined not to get screwed, I went online and ordered the 10 seasons of Friends.

Being that I play with shopping cart creation in my spare time, I'm a little critical of an online shopping experience done poorly. Best Buy, with their geek centered target audience, has an ecommerce site that sucks:

• Poor Layout - if you go to search for something on the Best Buy site, odds are your mouse is going to roll over their navigation buttons, which then cause a pop-up menu that covers up the search fields.
• Hard To Order Multiple Items - the seasons of Friends were featured on a single page. Clicking the "add to cart" button fired Javascript (which does no good if you like to open links in Mozilla Tabs, like me) to add the item and then take you to a cart page. Once at the cart page, there's no easy way to return to your search page with all the items I wanted to buy except for the back button - which for some reason was painfully slow. I think the javascript or the search was firing again. If I was able to add items using the browser tabs, I could have finished my order in the time it actually took to add 2 things to my cart.
• Poor Shipping Implementation - Amazon knows how to ship goods. They give you the option of shipping multiple items right now if they have everything in stock, albeit at a slightly higher shipping charge, or you can combine all of your items into a single shipment and save on shipping. Best Buy had $1.69 shipping per season of Friends. They'll ship things when they're good and ready. Over the course of 3 days, I received emails saying they had shipped all 10 seasons. In 9 shipments. From the same place. How disorganized do these people have to be to make 3 separate shipments to me on the same day?

With all of that said, there is at least one thing that Best Buy's online shopping does [almost] right. You're not required to create an account to place an order. The odd thing is, to track your shipment(s), you have to log in with your order number, last name, and phone number. I don't really think of order tracking as a secure procedure, so why not just ask for a name or phone number along with the order number?

So, with any luck now at some point in the next week I'll find up to 9 parcels on my stoop. Parcels that will remind me of the pain of ordering online from Best Buy.

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Stoopwatch (May) 2006!

05.19.2006

Today is the day I should have multiple parcels arriving on my stoop, at least according to the estimated delivery time on orders from a couple of places.

Order #1 is a new bookcase from Staples. It's to match 5 other bookcases I already have. Staples didn't charge me shipping, but did charge me tax. Staples isn't telling me where the bookcase is shipping from, but I do know from ordering that they only had 1 bookcase in stock.

Order #2 is a desk with bonus material from Office Depot. I say "bonus material" because, thanks to Dealnews, I found a coupon for $40 off purchases of $200 or more. The desk was $169.99 (plus tax, which didn't help the coupon). I added a really fancy gel wrist support and some office supplies which upped the total to $201. After the discount of $40 to adjust the total to $161, I ended up saving $9 once it was all over with. All of this is to arrive on my stoop, but again I don't know from whence Office Depot is sending it.

Order #3 is a funky new gaming keyboard from Newegg.com. Luckily, they have good shipping and tracking info. Last night I could see that the keyboard was making its way from SECAUCUS, NJ to MONTGOMERY, AL. I don't know if it can finish its trip and then make it to my house today, but that's what the estimated shipping date is saying.

Order #4 is a handful of Starship Troopers Miniatures from Art's Game Store. I've bought stuff from Art before on the eBay, so I've pretty much got his shipping schedule down. He ships from Cleveland, Tn on Wednesdays and then things get to my stoop on Fridays. Of all the other orders, this is the one I'm most sure about getting here today.

Orders #5 & #6 don't have an arrival date yet. #5 is the new computer I bought from Digital Storm. Today/Monday is the scheduled day for it to ship, since their construction, testing, and ship date estimate is 5-10 business days, and today is day 10. The computer is about to enter the final phase of construction, which I hope is "put in box and send". It'll be coming from San Jose, California, so it's going to take a few days to get here. I know the worse part is going to be getting the "pc has shipped" notification, then watching the tracking as it crawls across the nation.

Order #6 is the new floor for the computer room. After putting it off for a year, if not two, I'm finally getting new laminate installed to replace the grey carpet that I hate! Moran Carpets was to order the laminate yesterday (although I bet it doesn't happen until today). I've no idea how long it will take for the laminate to be shipped, much less the time afterward to schedule instalation. But it's going be be done!

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Update!
All the appropriate parcels arrived on my stoop without incident, much to my surprise. In addition, the floor (Order #6) is now scheduled for installation on June 6th, so now all that's left in the world fo the unknown is the forthcoming computer......

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Car Wars & South Beach

05.16.2006

Ok, for the diet update my official weight loss for the week of going on vacation: -3 lbs, bringing my net total for the since the end of March to -38 lbs. Ah, there's less of me every day!

I got some email from Michael at SWAT (a Car Wars site) yesterday. He was very nice and pleasant, offering to help me out in my ever present quest for missing Car Wars supplements, along with being available for Car Wars discussions and observations. Reading his email made me realize that I miss my carefree high school years when Jer and I would design some vehicle and proceed to blow the bejeezus out of each other.

Jer and I have tried multiple times in the last few years to go back and play a game of Car Wars, but a couple of things keep standing in our way

• Time - There's not as much free time when you're 37 as there was when you were 16. The only thing taking up time back then was homework, maybe an errant household chore. Now there's work, bills, laundry, everyday chores, and for some odd reason, flopping down on the couch in front of the tv has become more and more important.
• Time To Get Ready - This is probably a subset of the above, but it would generally take about 3 hours for us to get ready to play a game of Car Wars. We never used the same vehicle twice, so every game started with both of us designing new cars from scratch, regardless that each car was probably 90% similar to the last one we made.
• Shorter Attention Span - I swear as I get older my attention span diminishes. After 3 hours of designing a car, I'm ready to just be done with it.
• Interests Not In Synch - To really have fun playing a game, all the players need to be interested. It's easy to get excited about playing a game Friday night, even though it's just Monday. By the time Friday night rolls around, lots of much more interesting things have usually popped up.
• Can't Remember The Rules Anymore - When we played the game religiously, all the little, important rules of the game were readily available in either mine or Jer's brain. After a 10 year (at least) layoff, most of my Car Wars knowledge has been replaced by HTML, PHP, VB, and some database queries. It's a little annoying to have to stop every 5 minutes of a game to look up a rule, or a targeting modifier, or to try and remember how much damage a trailer full of plastique is supposed to do.

As much as I miss playing, I doubt we'll ever really get down to playing another game again. Of course, it doesn't mean I won't reminisce about the good old days.

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South Beach / Gulf Shores

05.11.2006

Ok, I just got back from a wonerful trip to Da Gulf Shores, where my personal highlight was eating PIZZA! I know, I know, where does one get low-carb pizza? Well, I was on vacation and it was a carb loaded treat!

Well, not too carb loaded. I would have felt guilty overdoing it so I limited it to a this crust pizza with all kinds of good-for-me toppings. Dude, it was good!

Except for the pizza and a side trip to some fried crawfish and crab cakes (Tangent: It's hard to find non-fried seafood in South Alabama) I stayed on my diet. I made my official weigh-in on Sunday and was down to 369 lbs (-2 lbs from the week before, for a total of -35 lbs in 6 weeks). I hesitantly made my way on the scales this morning to see what pizza, crawfish, and crab cakes had done, especially since it was starting to look like I was about to hit a plataeu last week. Turns out this morning's weigh-in was 368. Another pound down!

Maybe after losing another 35 lbs I'll treat myself to some more pizza?

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