Building Prep

06.28.2006

Following my Lego building fun from the weekend, I took it upon myself to build some more Legos last night. This time I was building a Batboat, a little departure from my Star Wars oriented Lego-ness.

I think I have as much fun getting out the Lego blocks and pieces and grouping them to where I can find things almost as much as putting them together. I know, I'm odd. I have this anal thing about organization. I go to places like Staples and Office Depot and window shop for binders, folders, and sheet protectors. But I enjoy things having a place and knowing where they are.

I think part of that is from living alone. If I lose or misplace something, I have nobody to blame but myself, and I hate blaming myself for things. I would much rather tell myself I've doen something well and then reward myself.

Lego Batboats make good rewards!

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What've I Been Doing?

06.26.2006

I've actually had little things to blog about over the past few days, but nothing really worthy of a post dedicated to itself. So with that in mind, I give you my half-week in a nutshell!

Thursday: While running errands in Madison at Home Depot and Lowes at 4:00PM. I found that it was hot. Damn hot. 100° according to the car. This got me to wondering what the heat index was, and how it was calculated. If you want to calculate the heat index yourself, you can use the following:

Heat index (HI), or apparent temperature (AI) = -42.379 + 2.04901523(Tf) + 10.14333127(RH) - 0.22475541(Tf)(RH) - ((6.83783 x 10-3)(Tf2) - ((5.481717 x 10-2)(RH2) + ((1.22874 x 10-3)(Tf2)(RH)) + ((8.5282 x 10-4)(Tf)(RH2)) - ((1.99 x 10-6)(Tf2)(RH2))
Tf= air temperature in degrees Fahrenheit, RH= relative humidity expressed as a whole number
It's a lot easier to just plug the numbers into an online calculator, but it's nice to see some of the freaky math involved.

Friday: I watched the Steve Martin Pink Panther movie. Although the critics dislike it, I found it to be a fun, if not silly, movie. In other words, it was like the other Pink Panther movies. So, I liked it, even though it was a lowly PG movie. I'll be doing a bad French accent for a while now.

Saturday: I relived being 12. I got up around 10:00. I finished up the last 2 levels on Half Life 2. I made a Lego Star Wars V-Wing, which was a lot more fun than I would have thought. Now I can continue on to make the armload of other unmade Legos I have in the closet!

Sunday: Nothing special. Laundry, grocery shopping, and grilling.

Monday: Weigh-in, where I've now lost of total of 51-freakin' pounds! Yay me!

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No Time To Lose

06.22.2006

Lately I've been dealing more with people coming to the house to fix/install things, and the time schedules therein. I, along with everyone else, wonders why the cable guy will show up "between 9:00 and 12:00". Of course it's variable depending on how long the previous job takes, but based on people doing these things forever, I would think that they would have a better idea than which half of the day they're going to show up.

When I was waiting on my new pc to be delivered via UPS, I was surprised when they didn't show up at their normal 10:00-10:30 delivery range. UPS. Tightest ship in the shipping business. Numerous bundles from Amazon and eBay have gotten there in the 10:00-10:30 range. The once time I stay at home in case a signature is needed... 2:00PM delivery.

Whenever I go to the doctor, there's about an hour wait in the waiting room. Now, my regular doctor works out of a walk in clinic and you can't make an appointment. That's my fault for sticking with him for the past 12 years and not going to someone else. My previous doctor, who I really liked and let you make appointments, had anywhere from a 1½ hour to 2½ hour wait. I would think that since the walk-in clinic works on a first come-first served basis, that would be the reason you were waiting so long. One Monday morning I arrived at the office an hour before they opened, managing to beat the next person to show up by about 5 minutes. When the office opened and we filed in, I still waited 20 minutes before going to the back to get my temperature and blood pressure taken, followed by another 15 minutes or so before the doctor showed up. First in line and it still took half an hour to see the doc.

When Josh the refrigerator repair dude comes for me semi-regular repair visit (the last of which is needed before the Frigidaire-bastards sanctioned replacement - supposedly) I'm generally the first person on the route. With that, he's been showing up at 8:00, maybe 8:10. Punctual. Consistent. I nice change.

Tuesday there was a note on my front door from the utility department saying there would be a scheduled power outage Thursday from 7:00 to 11:00 as they cut branches from around power lines in the area. This morning my alarm-radio started at 7:00. As it started to play, it shut off due to the power suddenly being cut. Talk about being punctual, these guys have got it down. Of course, the power being out is more of an inconvenience than anything so of course they're going to be punctual!

I just hope the air conditioner can catch up with the heat once the power comes back on.

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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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