Another Word for Nerd

Matt Martinez, of Matt’s El Rancho, has passed away. His restaraunt (now run by his descendants) is one of our favorite places to eat.

(note: this is about Black Friday 2004)

Got up at 7:30 this morning, and all of our normal breakfast places were closed, or too far away (Round Rock). Ended up going to Waterloo on Burnet. Excellent biscuits and gravy.

Around 8:30, drove up to our normal pool supplies place, but they were closed. CompUSA and Best Buy had apparently opened at 6am for the “Black Friday” day-after-thanksgiving sales. Ended up going to Walgreens to get a 20-pack of colored Sony CD-Rs for Amy.

I got bored and ventured back to CompUSA around 9:30am. One of their sales was “Three 30-packs of Memorex 52X CD-Rs for $7.95″. They looked cleaned out, but lo and behold, on the very bottom shelf, in the back, were twelve 30-packs. I split them with the guy who was looking next to me, and ended up with 180 blank CD-Rs for less than $18.

Other than that, just hanging out and doing pool maintenance today.

Anybody want to buy a car? Any reasonable offer accepted; our secondary vehicle is the truck now and the convertible is just taking up driveway space.

“It’s My Life”, the new single from No Doubt, *really* reminds me of mid-to-late-80s retro music. I like it.

I’ve found that I prefer Silk Soy Nog to actual “real” egg nog. It definitely has soy undertones, but the “nog” flavor is good and the consistency is *thinner* than the real stuff – which is the way I like it. Silk has a “Spice Soy Latte” as well, but I haven’t found it to be able to try it yet.

On Tuesday, after we finally got through finding a vehicle for Amy on Monday, I went to Dell’s web site and ordered the M992 19″ monitor, which was marked “Usually Ships Same Day”.

By Thursday, my order was still marked “Processing Order”. I called to inquire, and apparently they’d gotten my credit card expiration date wrong, and therefore it had been declined. I gave them the correct information, they put the order through right then, and it was back to “Processing”.

Late last night my order status changed to “It’s on its way” and “In Transit to Local Carrier”. While I was at home for lunch today, Airborne Express arrived with my new monitor. I quickly unhooked and moved the 17″ monitor I’d been using, unpacked and hooked up the new display, and ran SuperCal to tweak color and gamma settings.

The M992 isn’t a Trinitron, but is made by Samsung and has the best picture I’ve ever seen on a flat-screen non-Sony monitor. I should have gotten one of these two weeks ago, and never even messed around with alternatives. Amazing value for $243 (shipped).

Tonight I’m taking the Envision monitor (which I packed back up last night) back to Conns to get a refund on it.

I’ve not had good luck with monitors lately.

Wednesday, I purchased a Sony 17″ LCD display from Conn’s on Anderson Lane here in Austin. Thursday night I noticed bad pixels and an uneven backlight on it. So, I packed it up and took it back Friday. Instead of another 17″ LCD, I got an Envision EN-985E 19″ CRT monitor.

Got the CRT home, and it had image bloom (where the size of the entire picture on screen changes if you switch from a mostly-dark to a mostly-light picture). I took it back and got a replacement. Got the replacement home, and it does the same thing.

I’m not going to take this back for yet another replacement, as all of their stock has the same manufacture date on the boxes. Instead, I’m going to take it back, get my money back, and go buy a Dell/Sony M992 Trinitron display that I know won’t have this problem.

Why do my cats LOVE cardboard boxes so much? If they can’t get in them, they get ON them!

A Weinerschnitzel opened up about a week ago, not far from my house. We went there for lunch (and dinner too, actually) today. VERY good food; they have better chili and cheese than say, Sonic.

We can’t help think of the song “Weinerschnitzel” by the Descendents, on the soundtrack to this movie, when we go through the drive-through. “Welcome to the Weinerschnitzel, can I take your order please?”

I found out today that my favorite place for packing and shipping stuff has apparently been sold and is under new management with new staff.

Drive-Thru Postal, on Burnet just south of Anderson, has been where I mail things (everything from bills to taxes to large computer equipment) since mid-1998. I’ve done so much business there that it wasn’t unusual to get discounts on shipping, or get boxes and packing materials free when I needed them.

Went in today to ship a rather large computer system to a friend in Plano, and found that the inside of the place has mostly been gutted of things like greeting cards, trinkets, etc. The normal copier was gone, replaced by a smaller one on a folding table. From talking to the guy behind the counter, the nice motherly older lady that ran the place for years no longer works there. I’m guessing she sold the business.

The new staff are rude, unhelpful, don’t speak english very well, and have no clue how to properly pack a computer system for shipping via UPS. I went ahead and shipped the system (because it needed to get out), but I won’t be going back there for any of my business. There’s no quicker way to lose a five-year customer than to piss them off.

I detest Mailboxes Etc (aka “The UPS Store”) because they overcharge and jack up rates, and no longer offer any carrier other than UPS (no FedEx, etc). Anybody have suggestions for packing/shipping/mailing that aren’t “go to the post office”? There’s a PakMail not far from here, but I’ve not had any experience using them.

Got home last night, and the top 1″ of the new LCD panel was darker than the rest of the screen (backlight problem?) and there was a prominent stuck pixel right in the middle of the display.

I took it back to Conn’s today and got an Envision EN-985E 19″ CRT monitor instead. The assistant manager gave me a 1-year “bring it back to the store and we’ll give you another one” warranty for my trouble, and it has a three-year manufacturer’s warranty as well.

Ended up saving $349.