Archive for category purchases

Ikea

January 25th, 2010 @ 1:01 am - No Comments

I made the mistake of returning to an Ikea store today (yesterday, by the posting date on this). We need some curtains and while we’re not sure what we want, we still haven’t seen it and thought maybe we’d get lucky at Ikea and maybe find some other things in the process. My wife digs Ikea. I think Ikea is lame. We left with a wok (yay stir fry!) and two cheap plastic bins my son can put his overflowing lego collection in. It was a total waste of my time and I now know why I only need to visit an Ikea every 4 or 5 years.

I know Ikea stores are a fresh and new idea for a lot of people, but Pittsburgh had one of the first. Way back when I was a kid and didn’t care a bit about home goods, the hillfolk of western PA were getting dumb little chairs and tables at Ikea. The first time I actually stepped foot into one was when we moved back to Pittsburgh in 2004. My wife’s hotel was across the highway from it and we lived like 10 minutes away. Basically, it was quick local shopping for us that people would drive hours to visit – go figure.

I initially thought it was the best place in the world. But I noticed that the more I returned the less enthused I was about what they had. It lost its luster a little more with each visit. We’ve owned a few things from Ikea. We had some chairs that were fine. We gave them away after a couple of years because we really didn’t need them any more. We had some neat big white curtain thingies that we used in front of our sliding glass door. We had a funky-sized artowrk thingy that the movers broke when we came to Dayton. My daughter’s side table in her bedroom as I type this came from Ikea and it does what it does.

In fact, that’s the thing about Ikea – their shit is fine. If you just need to slap together a little table and toss it in the corner, it’s fine. Need a shelf somewhere? Stop at Ikea, their shelves are just fine.

So my wife got me to drive to the Cincy Ikea that opened in late 2008 or something like that. Long enough ago to be established but recent enough to still be ‘new’ and an attraction for people.

I can say that the place offers me next to nothing. In general, I don’t think their furniture is nice. It’s plasticky. Not necessarily literally (although sometimes) but in a more general way. If I was allowed one adjective to describe the furniture in Ikea, I’d choose plasticky. (and I’d spell it like that too) Every thing has a shiny, plastic, retro-modern look to it – even wood items. It’s not that it necessarily looks cheap, it just doesn’t look right. It looks like dollhouse furniture or something. I can’t quite put my finger on it or find the right words to get close. It’s off.

Which is fine when you’re finding something significantly cheaper than you can elsewhere – like the aforementioned fabrics, little sidetables and one-off shelves. That’s the one place Ikea excels…or at least makes some sense to me.

But it just feels like as far a big things go, you can do much better for “same ballpark” prices at any number of furniture stores…and the things generally will have nice finishes that don’t look so plasticky…and aesthetic design, not just functional design.

Speaking of design, the style just screams college dorm room chic to me. Again, I use that for lack of a better term, but it’s like a manufactured, fake sophistication – fauxphistication (can I trademark that?). I can’t imagine furnishing my house with the stuff at Ikea (and I mean in any significant way, remember, I have some of this crap in the corners around here too) beyond the age of 25…30 if I’m generous and definitely at 25 (or less) if you’re in a relationship and cohabitating.

I dunno, it just doesn’t do it for me on any level. I’m less enthused everytime I visit a store. I suspect the same happens to their products in the house (again referring to big things – like doing a room in all Ikea crap). Like at first it’s a shiny and sleek and everyday it starts to look a little plastickier (oh yeah, I went there with the spelling) and a little less shiny until you hate it and realize you bought weird fucking Swedish shit for your house.

I’m sure there’s someone going to read this who swears by the place and has an Ikea house that will be sure to let me know how nice their stuff is. That’s fine. To each their own. It’s certainly not for me, so maybe it’s for you.

Today’s visit was a special treat though because of the extra super special Sunday morning crowd. It was the stop-and-gawk theme park mentality taken to the max. And yes, I realize that’s kinda what you do in a furniture store – stop and look. But it was a wonderful mix of yokels from the southern Ohio, Southern Indiana, Northern Kentucky area who were amazed at the shiny visions of plasticky furniture that was “surely from the fyooture” and wannabee hipsters and intellectuals who took it way too seriously and discussed extra-loudly why this piece worked and why it would work in whatever area of their swank pad needed this piece. It was like the fucking Twilight Zone. I’ve never seen so many Ikea-goers with the checklists and tiny mini-golf pencils going around scribbling whatever it was you scribble on those little pieces of paper. My daughter and I picked up a paper/pencil combo about halfway through and kept imaginary mini-golf scores with it…whenever we weren’t pretending a cobra was jumping out of everything that could be opened and striking when we opened it.

Turns out we didn’t find any curtains and their selection of artwork/stuff for the wall was lame at best. I’m convinced at least 50% of it was the same stuff I saw during my last visit to the Pittsburgh store 4 years ago.

Oh yeah, I almost forgot – the stupid-ass product names. Arrrgh! I’m convinced it’s just abstract word association with ‘modern’ misspellings. For example, let’s pretend we need to give a clock a product name. Hmmm. Clock. Clocks keep time. Units for measuring time. Hours. Days. Minutes. Years. Decades! Now a funky modern misspelling and voila!

The clock product name is Dekad.

It really feels that shallow and manufactured most of the time….just like the furniture!

(yes, I understand the names are usually Swedish words that are just literal translations or adjectives describing preferred qualities of the product, but’s it’s not cutesy and SKÄRPT – it’s silly and OMTÖCKNAD.)

Whatever. Your mileage will vary to be sure. I’m not a fan of the place and, by my estimation, won’t step foot in another Ikea store until 2014 or so.

Paint Samples

January 17th, 2010 @ 3:25 am - No Comments

On the wall:

Melted Butter = I Don’t Hate It
Vanilla Custard = Grew On Me
Sahara Shade = Blech!

Going to try Donegal Tweed as a replacement for Sahara Suck.

Christmas Hangover

December 28th, 2009 @ 2:21 pm - No Comments

For me, the build-up to Christmas is a lot like a night out drinking. It’s a lot of fun and you get caught up in the moment, but the next morning you pay dearly for throwing your cares to the wind.

I approach doing Christmas like a frat boy approaches a night out.

“Oh yeah. What the hell, buy that too! No get the bigger one! It’s Christmas!!!”

There’s no doubt we had a hell of a Christmas around here, but now that it’s all over, I have Christmas remorse. When you’re using WWE tickets as simple stocking stuffers, you probably went too far – at least in my world.

The big items under the tree this year included an LCD TV, laptops (yes, plural), power tools, dvd players, and big-ticket toys like the huge Transformers Devastator figure that’s like 6 other normals sized figures that hook together to make one huge one that my son got.

It was fun. But now I’m looking at credit card statements and it’s less fun. I’m suffering a Christmas hangover.

The weather was all anti-Christmas too. We got snow leading up to the big day, just before Christmas Eve is got all warm and rained and the snow was gone just in time for the holiday. Then, as if on cue, it started snowing again yesterday and as I look out the window, it’s spitting snow right now and everything is a lovely white. Literally, the only days of the past week or so without snow on the ground were Christmas and the days sandwiching it.

We’re also quite militant about getting rid of Christmas. I don’t understand decorating on (or before if the lights I see on houses were any indication) Thanksgiving and leaving all that crap up into the new year. Seems weird to me to spend a tenth of your life with lights and garland and the usual crap strewn about your home. Over the years we seem to have settled into a nice pattern of getting a tree and putting up decorations the first weekend in December and taking it all away the weekend after Christmas. This year that meant a nice three-week window of festive joy. Exactly enough as far as I’m concerned. Things are back to normal and I like it.

And to top it all off we’ll be spending New Year’s eve at the hotel. Seems appropriate to ring in a new decade with my wife at work being as that’s exactly how we spent it 10 years ago ruinging in the new Millennium. Yeah, we spent the biggest New Year’s celebration in 1000 years with my wife as she worked. It was literally, the two of us and our daughter (this was before our son) and the hotel maintenance guy standing in an empty lobby watching the ball drop on TV.

No big deal though. Crap like that is usually overrated and sometimes (a lot of the time, really) that’s the price you pay for being the boss. But on the flip side it’s because she’s the boss that we can have Cristmases that include TVs, laptops and event tickets as stocking stuffers.

Even after all these years, I’m still often amazed (though not surprised) at the attitudes of most (not all) hourly employees that have worked for my wife. It’s simply been too many over the years for it to be a fluke or something. The sample size is wide and vast and the results are always the same. Most of these people go out of their way to do the bare minimum and take advantage of the system any chance they get. I’m also convinced this attitude is exactly why most of these people are stuck in basic, hourly positions. Of course, they never see it that way. They’re always the first to complain about never getting a break or getting screwed. They think they have a crappy attitude because life keeps shitting on them when the truth is life keeps shitting on them because they have a crappy attitude…and like I said you see it time and time again. They just don’t see it. They think the coworker who got the promotion was just lucky. They don’t see that that person went above and beyond – actually helped out, did what was needed and picked up the slack when others dropped the ball.

That might have been a little confusing so let me put it into context. Basically, there’s no night auditor to work New Year’s even at the hotel. The weekend girl who would normally do Fri-Sun was fired last week after simply no-showing. What made it worse was that my wife and the front desk manager went out of their way to save her job after she missed so many shifts that she was supposed to be fired but gave them a sob story about hard times and her kids and such. My wife put her ass on the line to her bosses and saved the girl’s job with a stipulation that she had to show up for 30 days to have points removed…blah blah blah. Of course, my wife has been around the block a few times and suspected the worst, however a combo of a big heart and lack of potential replacements led her to not fire this girl, so she worded things in a way that if the girl started dicking around after that 30 she could fire her.

Lo and behold on days 31 and 32 the girl never showed. She got fired.

The other lady who does Mon-Thur has been at the hotel for years – long before my wife took over. She’s solid and does the work, but refuses to go beyond what she has to. She works her four days – no more. She’s also very afraid to drive in bad weather and knows that she has X number of sick days each year and uses then anytime it snows or whatever. Even more coveniently, if it’s a bad year and she uses all those days, she always manages to make it in after that. That leaves my wife with a worker who’s less than ideal, but she has absolutely no legal ground to push her out the door.

Which is probably not a bad thing as the employee pool seems to get worse and worse. I know times are supposed to be tough, but finding employees around here still isn’t easy. My wife interviewed two people after she fired the first girl I mentioned and before Christmas. The first was interested in the Audit position, but refused to work weekends. Well, the position that needs filled is the Fri-Sun one. Guess you don’t need a job that badly then. The second listed that they were interested in any position and once they found out it was Night Audit (the night shift, basically 10pm – 6am) they suddenly weren’t interested in any position anymore.

There’s a reason the first girl doesn’t have a job and the second has been a night auditor with no advancement for nearly a decade (and that the two interviewees are jobless even) – they do nothing to get ahead. They’d also most likely (in my humble experience as the husband of the bosslady for so many years) be the first to complain about how they get screwed and how lucky people like my wife are.

They just don’t see it.

People like my wife get where they are because they deserve to be there. My wife is the type of person who would take that shitty overnight job if she needed work. She’s the type who went in and covered shift when the other idiots called off on holidays. She worked her way up and became the bosslady because she got it done, not because she did just what she had to…or less as the case may be. She’s still the first to run up to the third floor and start stripping beds if housekeeping is shoort staffed for the day…and what’s funnier (and sadly, typical) is the housekeeper reaction…which is usually, “You know how to clean a room!?” Like she never did a thing in her life other than sit behind a desk…or worse, like she does nothing but sit behind a desk. It’s those people – the ones who think that – that don’t get it and probably never will. They’re convinced life is screwing them and that those who get ahead are just lucky.

Whoa. Sorry for that rant. That just came out.

The point is, my family will be spending this New Year’s Eve alone with my wife as she works…and that’s ok. It’s because of quirky little things like that that have the ability to give ourselves Christmas hangovers.

Maybe that hangover isn’t so bad after all.

Overboard

December 16th, 2009 @ 10:55 pm - No Comments

Just totaling up the X-mas receipts. Sigh.

Looks like another light travel season this summer while we play some catch-up…a lot of catch-up, really.

Two Years of Chevy

September 11th, 2009 @ 1:19 pm - No Comments

It was two years ago that we got the HHR. I can’t say I regret buying it. It’s a decent vehicle at a good price, but when it comes time to swap out to a new vehicle I’m certainly in a place where I’d like something a little more upscale and sportier…and maybe a sexy black color. But being as the wife has swap privledges WAY before I do, I should just forget about that for now.

In two years I put 17,180 miles on it – which is a bit lower than the standard 1000 miles per month thing that seems to get thrown about a lot.

But that includes amusement park trips. If we had used the Nissan for those drives I’d be under 12,000. (yes, we’ve driven over 5000 miles to amusement parks in the past two years…even sicker considering the only 2009 trip drives have been a handful of jaunts to Kings Island)

And this is more of a stretch, but if I also knocked off the 5 drives back home, I get a number that’s under 9,000.

Meh, whatever. I could rationalize it down to zero if I had to.

The point is, I’ve had the HHR for two years now. At this point, I’m pleased with my purchase.

(and yes, I said, “jaunts” – fuck you for noticing)

Billy, Put Down Grandpa’s Wipin’ Stick

June 3rd, 2009 @ 12:51 am - 2 Comments

You might remember, it was over two years ago now that I went nuts and started requesting every crappy catalog that I could remember from my childhood. I’d be lying if I said quickly browsing them wasn’t a guilty pleasure. I got tons of them and surprisingly, many just kept coming…and coming…and coming. I thought I’d be safe when we bought the house and moved, but lo and behold, I found a Walter Drake catalog staring me in the face when I checked the mail yesterday. I finally got a chance to look through it this afternoon and it’s full of the usual things that only shut-ins and the elderly buy. One notable exception is that they sell dildos and vibrators now (nonreturnable, mind you – who knew grandma and the weird lady at the end of the street had it in them…literally)

But it was until this evening that my wife found the mother of all craptastic catalog items – The Long Reach Comfort Wipe

I mean, wow! Like holy fucking shit wow! I realize that my life had no meaning before this. This creates so many more questions than answers for me. I don’t even know where to begin with such ridiculous greatness.

All I can imagine is the family making the reluctant visit to great grandpa’s house and little Billy complaining the whole way because it’s so boring there and it smells funny and Grandpa always has saurkraut flavored candies. After a while there, Billy uses the bathroom and finds this thing and comes out swinging it like a sword and making Lightsaber noises, “Zhroooommmmmm Mrooooommmmm” like a kid would do. And Grandpa, all unfazed and ornery would simply bark,

“Billy, put down Grandpa’s wipin’ stick!”

It’s like a little slice of heaven in my mind. Mmmmm.

New Thermostat

May 30th, 2009 @ 2:48 am - 5 Comments

One of the first things I wanted to do when we got this house was put a new thermostat in. I hated the old one. It was lame, ugly and the old owners had put marks on the side with an “H” and a “C” by them so they knew where to slide the lame plastic lever on the side without thinking. It fucking sucked.

Oddly enough, it’s been one of the few things that’s been overlooked. It just kept falling further down the importance list.

So today the guy the warranty company sent out for the A/C showed up and was pretty cool. (and of course the unit worked the entire time he was here)

He first checked the furnace in the basement, then messed with the thermostat for a minute, then went outside to the A/C unit. He found on loose wire that triggered the something or other (Sorry, I don’t give a shit). He also said the unit was wired weirdly – not incorrectly, but in an unusual way. He secured the loose wire and came back in. The thing was pretty much working. He opened up the thermostat and claimed it was on the verge of going bad (if it weren’t already) and showed me what he claimed was evidence of something or other (again, don’t care) arcing. So he calls the warranty people to see if that’s covered. He’s gone forever and finally comes in and apologizes saying the warranty people don’t want him to do the work because of what he charges. Even though he’s here and has diagnosed a potential problem and he has the part with him and it’s covered, they’ll send someone else out at a later date to do the work.

Whatever. He was instructed to charge us half of our deductable-per-incident and that was that.

We quickly got a phone call from the warranty people saying they’d send someone out today to do the work. Cool.

Or so we thought at first. But upon discussing it, we figured they’re probably going to replace the thermostat with some equally lame unit and we’ll be stuck paying the other half of the deductable for what essentially amounts to a $15 thermostat and labor. For a few bucks more (and I mean literally a few dollars) we could go pick a sweet thermostat up on our own and put hook it up. Seemed like a win/win for us to do it ourselves.

We called the warranty people who now claimed no one was coming, but we’d hear from them in the next day or two to set up an appointment (Sweet Fucking Jesus!) and we just said whatever – we’ll blow them off when they call.

We headed out to Lowe’s to pick up a thermostat and a dehumidifier (that’s part of the basement flood saga that’s not interesting enough for a blog post on it’s own – when it’s time to tell more of that story, I’m sure the dehumidifier will make an appearance) and made sure we still had 10% off coupons.

Note: if you ever plan on making a significant purchase at Lowe’s, just swing by the post office and pick up a handful of moving kits or mover’s guides or whatever they are – the things with all the info on moving and changing your address and shit. Each packet has a 10% Lowe’s coupon good for purchases up to $5000. (That’s potentially $500 savings) Since we bought the house, we always have some current coupons on hand. Seems like we live at Lowe’s anymore.

Anyway, we swung by and got the goods. I picked a fun touchscreen model from Hunter. When we got home I got the dehumidifier up and running in the basement and them got to work on the thermostat. I took the old one off and let the kids write their names on the wall behind it for future generations to find and then got to work on putting the new one up. It took no time at all and within minutes we had a nice new thermostat that didn’t look like it belonged in a low-end home from the 1980’s. Yay us!

Old Thermostat:
Old

New Thermostat:
New

It glows blue when the air is on and red when the heat is on. Stuff like that amuses me. Lots of settings and programmable stuff. Unfortunately, I didn’t get to play much as tonight has been one of the most comfortable evenings we’ve seen in a while. Windows open. Cool breeze blowing.

It’s supposed to get shitty again soon enough and then I can play with it a little more. (that’s what she said!)

$53.55

February 23rd, 2009 @ 2:43 pm - No Comments

After I picked the kids up from school, I stopped to get gas. I was getting the ‘low fuel’ warning from the HHR.

As I was pumping gas, I was trying to think of the last time I put gas in the HHR. I couldn’t remember; it’s been forever. So when I got home, I fired up Quicken and realized this is the first time I put gas in it in 2009!

I guess one of the benefits of living so close to everything is that we barely use gas.

Just for the record, including this fill-up today the total gasoline cost for the household (both vehicles) in 2009 has been $53.55.

Our Own Piece Of Ohio

December 16th, 2008 @ 1:51 pm - 5 Comments

It’s official. We own a tiny chunk of Ohio. This chunk to be exact:

Bird's Eye View

That’s a little less than 3/4’s of an acre and here’s what’s sitting on it:

Street View

Not too shabby.

So here’s the deal. About a year ago we noticed a house that we really liked was up for sale. We kept an eye on it, but it was just out of our comfort range as far as price goes and it was in an area we liked…mostly. The online listings never show indoor photos, just the outside (which was exactly what we liked) and they never held an open house or anything where we could get inside. We were never really serious about buying and didn’t have a realtor or get pre-approaved or anything like that, but we always kept an eye on that house because as time went on we talked more and more seriously about it. Finally May rolled around an a ‘Sold” sign went up. After doing some research we found out it went for a price much lower than listed and if we had actually pursued it rather than just looking on, we might have been able to get it. We never did see the inside and I prefer to think it sucked.

So in June I noticed a house just around the corner went up for sale…on the Cul De Sac. This one seemed like an even better fit. Better lot, nicer curb appeal, just a hair dated on the inside. The only catch was that it was WAY out of our price range. Still there was something that led me to keep an eye on it.

About a month later the sellers dropped their price a little. Interesting, but still out of our range.

Another month later and they dropped it again. Still out of our range, but the drops were encouraging.

Finally in August they had an Open House. We swung by and found quite a turnout. After spending too much time there (I’m sure the seller’s realtor thought we were up to something) we left knowing this house had everything we wanted except the right price. It was enough to make us get serious.

That week we hooked up with a lender and got pre-approved. It did indeed turn out that the house was still just out of our price range, but we were hopeful. We then hooked up with a realtor and in the first week of September made a date to look at some houses in the area. We made sure the house we liked was on the list even though we personally knew it was out of our price range.

After looking at six houses we knew more than ever this house was what we were looking for. It was on an awesome mature lot on a Cul De Sac. It wasn’t a pre-fab and it wasn’t stacked on top of a dozen other houses that looked just like it – which is pretty much all you can find in our neck of the woods unless you go with an older home and in this area that means late 60’s, early 70’s homes…and that’s just not our style.

In a nutshell, we were trying to pull some strings with an FHA loan and that was right about the time the government was making sweeping changes with how they worked. Essentiallly, we had a week to get the paperwork in if we wanted to finance that way, so with the time constraint, we decided to tell the sellers what the deal was an simply ask how low they could go (along with doing the same at two other properties that were ‘doable’).

I think deep down inside, we knew we weren’t going to jump on any of these offers unless the house we really liked came back pretty low. Turns out all three came back with prices that were either unreasonable (the ‘dobale’ houses) or still too high for us (the house we really liked on the Cul De Sac).

We kind of threw in the towel at that point. But we kept watching that house to see if they’d drop the price again. They held firm for the rest of September and at the end of the month the status went to ‘Sale Pending’ – I swear we almost cried. We started second guessing ourselves and wondering if we should have pushed to get it even though the price was really higher than we could afford.

I kept looking at new listings. Nothing good was going on the market and everything that was good was out of our price range. In the course of almost a year, we had seen two houses that we felt could work for us and they were around the corner from each other.

Then around mid-October a small miracle happened. The house on the Cul De Sac went back up for sale. We called our guy and had him find out what happened. Turns out the potential buyers backed out at the last minute.

The sellers ran another open house that weekend. My wife’s parents were in town and they wanted to see it since we had talked about it so much so she took them over. The seller remembered my wife (probably as the creepy lady who stuck around way too long at the first open house) and even mentioned that the sellers regretted that they didn’t have the time to negotiate further with our initial interest and they were ready to negotiate with a buyer.

After about a week of discussion, we decided it was time to strike. The owners weren’t dropping the listed price and it was still out of our pre-approved range, but with some negotiating and a bigger down payment, we could potentially make it work.

We scheduled an official showing at the beginning of November and after a final walkthrough decided to make an offer. There was a lot of contention (between me and my wife, us and our realtor, me and myself, etc) over what to offer. I really wanted to play off the pyscology of the whole thing. They weren’t dropping the price, but they’d been trying to sell for 5 months (pretty long in this area), they had one buyer fall though, they knew we were interested, their realtor mentioned they wished they’d played it differently with us the first time, it was coming up on the holiday season – a slow time for sales…

…lots that I thought I could use.

In a nutshell, my wife wanted to try to lowball them. I wanted to throw out a low offer, but one that wasn’t ridiculous that given the situation (the holidays, a spirit of negaotiation, the need to sale, etc.) the sellers would just accept as ‘close enough’. Our realtor thought we were both too low.

In the end we offered higher than my wife wanted to and a little lower than I wanted to, but close enough that I felt it was a win for me (smile). Our realtor was ok with it as he didn’t feel it looked like we were fishing, but told us to fully expect a counteroffer.

24 hours later were got the call.

The offer was accepted.

I could go into a long thing about how no one could believe they accepted (including the seller’s realtor) and how I feel like we played the situation exactly correctly, but it’d all sound like bullshit anyway. The point is they accepted.

We closed yesterday and the sellers should be out this weekend.

We ended up getting the house for about 13% less than it originally listed for and it appraised for almost about 10% more than we paid. Thinking like a numbers guy, the kicker is that while we still stretched our budget its farthest reaches, that the house, while only 13 years old, hasn’t had much updating on the inside. It feels like a house built in the mid-90’s. Without a doubt, bringing the house current to late 2000’s standards will bump that value even higher. It’ll take some time and that’s fine, I’m hoping we can spend a lot of time there.

It’s a house that fits us and our needs perfectly on a lot that fits our needs perfectly. It really is the perfect house for us.

I don’t have any of my own photos of the place yet so the two above that I lifted off of Microsoft Live and from the online listing will have to do.

The New Sony Camcorder

December 13th, 2008 @ 2:26 am - No Comments

The new camcorder came on Wednesday. I haven’t had a whole lot of chances to mess with it, but here’s some initial thoughts:

Depending on the shooting conditions video ranges from very, very good to pretty fucking sweet. I’d have been entirely ok with it and regular prices. For under $700, I’m estatic.

The thing is built like a tank – solid and wider than it is tall.

At the full 1920 x 1080, the hard drive holds around 15 hours of video. That should work until I’m able to finally upgrade my PC (long overdue). Right now I can store the video on one of my external drives if I want, but I’m not able to edit in any reasonable fashion. (so no samples for a little while)

It’s a consumer level Sony product, not a lot beyond pointing and shooting. It literally has an “easy” button on it…for real. A button labeled ‘Easy’. That’s ok though, I only need to point and shoot. There is the cool CAM Control button/dial on the front that you can assign a few functions to (focus, exposure, etc) that offer a bit of manual control. Using that and different shooting modes, I was able to get a pretty shallow DOF that looked kind of nice.

It records in 5.1 which is fun to say.

Probably lots of other little things that I’ll think of, find or use as time goes on.

I’m a happy boy.

Wanna Buy Something Too

December 3rd, 2008 @ 12:44 am - No Comments

Jeff just posted about having the urge to buy something and the various degrees of (and reasons for) apprehension in doing so.

I, on the other hand, am an asshole and proudly yell, “Get the fuck out of my way, I’m buying shit because I want to!”

I’ve been wanting to go HD with my camcorder. Face it, the world is there. Using a standard def camcorder for both personal things and for my coaster stuff seems silly. I don’t need a big honking professional piece of camera, just a cute little consumer cam that’s easy to use and makes nice video.

Basically I wanted a Sony HDR-SR12. (Yeah, more Sony. I’m like an abused girlfriend who still sticks with the guy claiming how great he is.)

I am Sony’s bitch.

So I bought one. But here’s the kicker – I got it for an outstanding price. Right around $680. Yeah, go look it up and find one for that…you won’t.

I got it thanks to a 10% coupon and a cashback promotion that Microsoft is doing to get people to use live.com.

Sure, I had to get it via ebay from one of those Brooklyn dealers who sell grey market stuff, but I just couldn’t pass it up at that price. And yes, they call to do a hard sell on a warranty and accessories, but I politely resisted and they were cool about it. I should have it in a couple of days.

The price, the idea that HD is the new standard, using it for coasterimage, Christmas, Disney trip in February, some other things that I’ll be sharing here when the time is right – it all fell into place for me to justify the purchase.

So yeah, I wanted to buy something and I didn’t hestitate. You shouldn’t either.

TV Service Woes Remedied

September 29th, 2008 @ 10:51 pm - 3 Comments

I believe I left off on Friday evening with the installer promising to return.

Well. He never made it. We had the football game early on Saturday, so I called him when we got home. He was completely on the other side of town and said he’d try to make it again. I explained my patience was running thin and he apologized, but in a way that kind of said, “I’m doing what I can…deal”

So by Saturday evening I’d finally had enough. We called AT&T’s 800 support number. They were extremely polite and as helpful as they could possibly be. It did turn out that the system wasn’t showing us as having those additional boxes. I got pushed to Tier 2 support and spoke with Jesus. (not literally Christ himself, but a hispanic fellow)

Again, great service and as helpful as can be. He confirmed the problem in the system and fixed it, but the boxes still didn’t work. The soonest they could get a tech out was Monday the 29th between 2pm and 4pm.

In total we were on the phone about 3 hours with AT&T support and they did everything they could. I was impressed, but still without TV.

So we lived the rest of Saturday and Sunday without TV except for the big one.

Cut to Monday at 2pm on the nose and the doorbell rings. I open it to find the original installer. I asked if they’d sent him or he came on his own and he was like, “I told you I’d get out here as soon as I could.” I explained that another tech was on his way.

The original dude went through all the processes again. Doubled checked connections. Ran tests. Tried things three times. Finally the other tech showed up and they’re both running in and out of the house all around looking at cables and wires, hooking up different gadgets, taking readings.

Finally after an hour of this, they walk in an inform me that the only thing it can be is a bad RG (residential gateway). For the uninformed the RG is the centerpiece of the whole system. The line in feeds to it and from there everything (TV, internet, phone) feeds off of it. Kind of a router for your home. This didn’t make much sense to me as the big TV and the internet have worked fins since day 1, but they swapped it out.

As soon as it booted and the bug TV was up again, we went upstairs and booted the other TV’s. A few minutes later and…

…everything was working.

The original dude just looked at me with a look that clearly said, “Motherfucker!” without saying a word. All of this time and hassle and all it was was a bad RG. It was as simple as swapping out one piece and connecting 3 cables and everything worked.

So the story has a happy ending.

After a week of kinda-service I have to say I can’t think of a thing that really bothers me about the service. My TV looks awesome, the channel selection is much better than Time Warner, my internet is just as fast down and three times faster up (nice for uploading pics to coasterimage) and the kids now have converter boxes and get the whole range of channels instead of the basics like we did with TW. On top of all of this, the monthly bill will be less than it used to be.

Now I can finish watching the Steelers suck it in crisp HD.

TV Service Woes

September 26th, 2008 @ 3:51 pm - 4 Comments

We’ve lived lots of places and dealt with lots of service providers with results running the gamut from awesome to acceptable to downright shit. When we moved to Dayton we just signed up with Time Warner and all was well – a little pricey, but fine.

Last Summer we got our HDTV and were less than impressed with Time Warner’s lineup. Not many HD offerings and some glaring omissions – like NBC in HD. Still we stuck with it mostly out of convenience and partially because of the standard promises of more to come. So over the past 15 months we see channels being dropped and replaced with ridiculous shit no one watches, still no more HD, not a lot to like, more price increases – but still we stick with them.

Then a week or two ago news break on how Time Warner and WDTN (our local NBC affiliate) can’t come to an agreement on a contract renewal and that on October 2nd we’d be potentially losing NBC too. Now I know this is unlikely (I’m not sure TW is dumb enough to let their customers go without NBC. But then again, they let us go without a basic network HD signal, so maybe they are that stupid…we’ll see.)

In the meantime I’ve been keeping my eye on AT&T U-verse. It looks like a solid service for a decent price using some fun technology and they were slowly getting it rolling in our area.

Cut to last week and things fell into place and we were placing our order with AT&T.

The installer dude showed up right on time this past Wednesday morning. He took a look at our place and the layout of things and was going to need access to the cable box on the side of the building – which was locked by Time Warner. So while he began, I got hold of TW and explained how they sucked and need to get here to open the box for the AT&T guy. After a long fight, they relented and said someone would be out, but they couldn’t guarantee when.

The AT&T dude got the big TV up and running and the internet as well, but couldn’t do any of the upstairs TVs because he was going to backfeed using the coax and needed into the box (locked by TW) to do it. So he hung around a bit and finally bailed for his afternoon appointment and I agreed to call him after TW has come and unlocked the box. He assured me that it’d be just 10 or 15 minutes to get the other TV’s working once we had access.

TW showed up late in the afternoon and I gave him a call and we agreed to finish Thursday morning. Cool.

Thursday morning he shows up, we get everything connected and…

…

…nothing.

He puts a call in to the level 2 support and does the whole thing on speakerphone so I heard it all. Basically the connections were all correct. There was no reason we should be getting service. After a while the support guy notices that no one put into the system that we should have 3 additional boxes. It should just be a matter of entering the info and letting it make it’s way though the system and then booting the set-top boxes. Cool again. The support guy says he’ll take all the necessary step to expidite it and it should be 2 or 3 hours. At that time he’d give the installer dude a ring, who in turn would be back to boot the boxes. After he hung up I informed him that I was more than capable of booting them (read: plugging them in) and the installer dude agreed to give me a call when he got his call…blah blah blah.

So a few hours pass. Nothing. Then a few more. Finally I cal the installer dude. He says he still hasn’t heard anyhting, but surely we’d be good to go. I booted the boxes. Nothing.

The installer dude said he’d get ahold of support and let me know. I never heard anything.

Late last night I said fuck it and tried again. The TV’s in the kids rooms booted, but the lock up after a few seconds and the TV in our room still won’t make a connection. Sigh.

So this morning I call the installer dude. He said he hadn’t heard anything back and was currently on an install. He asked what I had tried and I told him the deal. He seemed even more confused than before. He told me he’d stop by after his installs this evening if he finished early enough or tomorrow at the latest.

And that’s where things stand. I put my patience hat on and understand that shit happens, but it’s been 2 days since my ‘installation’ and I still only have 1 working TV and no real answers as to when or how the issues with the others will be resolved.

My patience hat ony has a few threads left…

The thing is, I really like the service. The picture is as good as or better than Time Warner’s in all cases and since it’s essentially a network, there’s lots of fun things you can do – like watch recorded shows from any TV with 1 DVR and customize weather, sports, stocks and traffic info to display on the TV and access the system from my desktop (or any PC) and set recordings or change things. Entry-level geek stuff that amuses me. I want the service. I like what I’ve seen so far. The channel offerings are superior to TW, the internet cnnection is faster and the price is about 25% less.

I’ll keep y’all updated.

Homies

July 4th, 2008 @ 2:04 am - 6 Comments

We didn’t head out to Indiana Beach. Instead we waited until a little after 10pm and went shopping. We needed to pick up some essentials like milk and bread and shit like that and Meijer seemed like a good choice. It was a weird mix of people for a Thursday around 11pm.

Anyway, our Meijer has a junk aisle. Well, I call it the junk aisle. It’s one aisle between the outdoor stuff and the toys that just has junk. It’s tons of outdated, oddball, damaged and discountinued items marked way down hoping to pawn the crap off on the masses. Some things you’ll find in the junk aisle include CO2 cartridges (whippets!), tons of blank VHS-C tapes, a damaged box of vaginal itch cream (the tube inside is intact though), random hair products of various ages and conditions, open box coffee makers, a set of cookware that is clearly a return because no one has bothered to remove all the wrapping paper from one side of the box where it was taped on – things like that.

We always take a look in the junk aisle and tonight was no exception.

Tonight I scored. There was a pile of children’s valentines boxes. Not a bunch, but more than a handful – maybe 20 or 25 boxes. A bunch of Pirates of the Carribean, a few High School Musical, even a Power Rangers or two in the mix. I was just sorting through them looking for a winner and I joked that we needed to buy a box and send valentines to everyone in July. Next thing I knew, I had found it. I had to buy them – the only ones in the whole bunch:

Homies Valentines

Homies Valentines

Homies valentines! For 12 cents!! How could I not buy them? What the fuck are homies and who would buy this crap? Valentines featuring generic pseudo-urban characters? For 12 cents!? Sign me up.

Now I’m not sure whether to keep them forever boxed – my 12 cent treasure or to send them to people. Because, face it, receiving a Homies valentine in mid-July would be pretty awesome.

I have them sitting here on my desk staring at me. We’ll be up surfing the net tonight, just me and my homies.

New Phone Revisited

June 29th, 2008 @ 12:02 am - 6 Comments

Thinking about snagging an LG Dare.

Anyone able to give me a reason not to?

More New Camera

June 5th, 2008 @ 12:29 pm - No Comments

I’ve (we’ve?) always had smaller (read: cheaper) little point and shoot cameras that I carried around in addition to the whichever ‘big’ camera I had. I like the convenience and face it, sometimes the big camera is overkill.

I recently gave away all the little cameras I had lying around. I got them in a plethora of places – I won one in an online photo contest, I was given one as a gift, I bought one five years ago. I gave them to family and friends who would appreciate them. My son was pissed as he’s the only one who doesn’t have his own camera, but I figure I can throw a cheap (but still better than the ones I had) one his way the fall for his birthday or X-mas.

My goal was to get a nice P&S camera that would essentially be Jamie’s, but that I could also slip into my pocket as a secondary camera if I felt the need.

After looking around a bit we decided on the Canon SD1100IS. Just a middle-of-the-road camera that had some decent reviews. We went with brown because we’re that damn cool.

It came this past Tuesday and with my family visiting it was a prefect trial for the camera.

I don’t have an samples available and ready to go right now, but it takes pretty nice pictures.

I also haven’t gotten to mess with it much, but there’s tons of settings to play with (I think you can even go manual) and the image stabilization and face recognition make it a great camera to stick in auto and let Jamie shoot away all day.

At least now we’ll have some photos of the family instead of just thousands of amusement park photos.

Memorial Day Weekend

May 27th, 2008 @ 2:20 am - 1 Comment

Just for the record, we made it a four-day weekend. On Friday we went Grill hunting.

Fun Fact: We haven’t owned a grill in almost 7 years.

The sick part is that Jamie really loves grilled food. Just one of those things that kept getting pushed to the side and next thing you know, you’ve gone 7 years without buying a grill. Whatever.

So we head out on Friday afternoon to find a grill.

Yep.

The Friday before Memorial day.

To buy a Grill.

Needless to say, everbody was out of stock. All that anyone had were the $100 el-cheapos or the $1000 I-don’t-think-sos.

I threw in the towel around 7pm, but Jamie called a friend and went back on the hunt.

She arrived with an unassembled grill just before 9pm.

Knowing that Saturday was going to be an all-day trip to Kings Island and that she wanted to be grilling on Sunday, I got to work. It was surprisingly easy. I put it together in the middle of the living room. VH1 Classic was doing a Heavy Metal Memorial Day Weekend, so I turned that on and listened to/watched Motley Crue’s Carnival of Sins show (the same tour we saw in Cleveland in 2005) and wrestled with the worst instructions ever as I pieced the thing together.

On Saturday we went to Kings Island. We arrived a little before noon which seems to be customary for us and knew we’d be spending the day. The park had all kinds of stuff going on and even though we broke the first ruler of amusement park visiting (don’t go on a Saturday) we still had fun barely riding and doing all the extra stuff they had going on (checking out the Clown Band, wasting time in front of the Kings Island Theatre with the retro thing they had going on there, seeing the live bands in Action Zone, witnessing the Robbie Knievel jump, hanging out for the badass fireworks) – just wasting a day at the amusement park.

We got home around midnight with a craving for Pizza. The only ones still delivering was Dominos. I ate Pizza and crashed…hard.

Sunday morning we headed to Dorothy Lane to score some meat for the grill. This was only our 4th or 5th time there. It’s a really neat place and has quality fucking food, but there’s a level of snobbery or pretentiousness that I don’t feel comfortable with.

We snagged some big fat steaks (a porterhouse and two sirloins), 4 of their gourmet hamburgers (a Greek, a Black and Bleu, a Turkey Ranch and a Bacon Cheddar) and some Chicken Drumsticks for the kids. I also grabbed some California Roll because it was fresh. We kept it around $70.

Then we hit Meijer and stocked up on the rest, hot dogs, chips, sparklers, bubbles for the kids – the good stuff.

We did the hamburgers and hot dogs on the grill. Good stuff. There were all kinds of kids from the neighborhood out playing for a change and it just felt like a warm spring holiday evening. After it got dark we became the sparkler pushers and blew through 6 packages of sparklers quicker than I thought we would. Kids came from all over to play with the sparklers. I wish I would have gotten some pictures because I haven’t seen that many kids hanging out and playing together since we moved here. In fact, I don’t think that many kids even live nearby. But I still had fun lighting them for everyone while Jamie handed them out – we had an assembly line thing going.

The kids had friends sleep over and they all disappeared upstairs and before too long it got quieter and quieter as they dozed off.

We used the night for out Tri-annual Desperate Housewives viewing. Yes, I watch Desperate Housewives – fuck you for asking.

What we do is DVR the episodes and then watch them in batches – usually after each sweeps period. It makes for a fun night of TV and rather than wasting time in little blocks each week on such mindless entertainment, we get it out of the way in one big block…and it’s so much more fun when you don’t have to wait to see the storylines play out.

So we had all the episodes since the writer’s strike ended to catch up on. 7 hours of Housewives can be done in 5 when you can skip the commercials and such. We started at 10pm and were done around 3am.

They ended the season with a flash-foward thing like Lost has been doing. Not sure if I dig it or not.

Monday was a lazy ass day for me. I slept in WAY too late and by the time I crawled downstairs, the kids were raring to go and everyone was on their way out the door to go play with a hose at the neighbors. The like to turn a hose on the trampoline and go nuts. It seriously amuses them for hours.

I said good-bye and plopped my fat ass onto the couch and vegged the afternoon away. I actually watched Rocky Balboa from start to finish.

They got back a little before 5pm and I fired up the grill. We had a friend over and I grilled up the steaks and chicken and potatoes and asparagus and it kicked ass.

We just kind of hung out for a bit and I spent the evening making sure the kids were ready for school tomorrow. (only 6 days left!)

Everyone went to bed and I got pics of the Robbie Knievel Jump online and now I’m typing this at two in the morning.

All-in-all I can’t complain.

New Phone Soon

May 21st, 2008 @ 6:10 pm - 7 Comments

I’m due to upgrade my phone with Verizon’s “new every two” thing that they do in a few days. Not sure I necessarily even need one, but I want one, so I’ll be upgrading.

Any suggestions? Phones to avoid? Phones to consider? Phones I shouldn’t make eye contact with?

My Wednesday

May 8th, 2008 @ 3:08 am - 2 Comments

This afternoon we decided to take care of some of the gazillion things that need done but no one seems to find the time. Jamie had to pick up a PC from the corporate office in Cincy, we needed to deposit some checks we’ve been sitting on for way too long, we needed to get our Kings Island passes, we needed haircuts, we had to take the PC to the hotel.

The plan was to get the PC, slide by Kings Island, hope to hit the bank before it closed, score haircuts, drop off the computer and get home.

We headed out at about 20-to-4 and had to get there before 5. Naturally, it started pouring rain about 10 minutes into the trip…then we hit the Cincy area rush hour traffic. Along the way we noticed a PNC branch relatively close to our destination. We figured we had a better chance of getting back to this one rather than going to Kings Island and then hitting the one we normally stop by on Tylersville Road.

At this point I had to piss like mad and just wanted to find a place to pee. Still getting to the bank in time was more important.

We made it to pick up the PC with 15 minutes to spare and began backtracking in the increasingly intense rain and equally thickening traffic. We pulled into the bank a hair after 5pm and I thought for sure they’d be closed. They were, but they helped us anyway. PNC is cool like that.

Still no pee, but at this point I figured I’d just wait until we get to the park.

From there we hit 71 north (a route I’ve taken maybe twice in my life and never to Kings Island) and I got stuck in a traffic pattern I couldn’t break free from and was forced off the interstate one exit too soon and it was the mother of all exits – backed up, people trying to shift lanes in all directions a big truck honking and trying to scoot over. I was jacked that I got caught up in the wrong lane and even more jacked that I hadn’t pissed yet. I spotted a Speedway and as the light off the exit turned green forced my way across three lanes and whipped into the gas station.

We get out of the HHR and are hit up by a FOX19 news lady and her cameraman wanting to talk about the fucked up exit/intersections. I sort of weaseled myself out of it and Jamie into it. They talked to her for like 45 seconds and we were off.

I finally got to pee (and scored a frozen Coke). We left to find them still outside interviewing people and laughed about having to watch the news on 19 this evening. We got back on 71 and were at Kings Island in a few minutes.

How quickly can one part with $600 – in a matter of seconds! That’s how fast.

Actually, the weekday evening pass purchase/processing thing they have going on is fabulous. It was no more than 10 minutes to part with our money and leave with passes in hand. Good stuff.

We made our way back to our neck of the woods and stopped by for a couple of haircuts and got in with no wait – nice. The chick doing my hair wouldn’t shut up though. I’m not a talker and I hate how no matter who I get, they always point out that this isn’t my real hair color. Yeah, I know it’s not, lady.

After that we dropped off the computer and I hooked it all up and booted it up and everyone rejoiced because the corn was saved. (part of that sentence is true and part is not – you decide)

By then it was going on 8 and there was no way in hell any of us were cooking so we stopped by Olive Garden. The place gets a bad rap sometimes I think, but I dig their Mixed Grill and tonight was no exception.

We got home and watched the stoner dude (who I hated until last night) get booted from American Idol.

After that I flipped to the FOX 19 news. What’s their lead story? The fucked up intersection. They used two clips of Jamie. I was dying – too funny. We’ve never been at that intersection in our lives and probably never will again and she’s on TV going, “This intersections sucks. We almost got taken out by a truck. They need to do something about it.”

Then we watched a little of an Eddie Izzard DVD (getting psyched for Friday’s show) and I played Mario Kart for a while…and now I’m typing this.

I should probably go to bed.

Mario Kart Wii (Updated)

April 28th, 2008 @ 3:49 am - 3 Comments

Sunday afternoon I went out and scored a copy of Mario Kart Wii. It comes with a little plastic steering wheel that you stick the Wiimote into. I wasn’t sure if I’d actually like it, but I knew the kids would be pissed if I only brought one home. A second wheel is just $10…no biggie, so I grabbed an extra one.

The kids managed to play for a few minutes while I cooked dinner. Looked fun. Looked like Mario Kart from what I could tell. I did notice Jamie showing interest in the wheel. She made the comment, “I might even be able to race with the steering wheel.”

Another case of Wii taking the intimidation of gaming and making it accessable to all. (hugs and happiness)

I didn’t get a chance to sit down with it until after we did the podcast and everyone was in bed. I like it that way.

I booted up the Wii a little after 11…say 11:15 or so. I started playing through the circuits with the 50cc karts to get a feel for the game and the tracks. Two hours later I had finished all 8 circuits winning them all but one.

So I decided to connect to the Wi-Fi and play a little online action.

This may be the most addictive thing since masturbation. I kept saying, “One more race” over and over until I finally forced myself away from the TV and to my desk to write this. It’s now past 3:30am. I’ve played for a little over four hours and haven’t even gotten to try out the bikes yet.

What can I say about the game – it’s Mario Kart. It’s a lot like every Mario Kart game you’ve ever played. I suspect people either like Mario Kart or they don’t.

There’s a few new features or new ways of doing things, but nothing that should be too foreign to those familiar with the game. I happen to LOVE the little plastic wheel as a controller. The driving motion feels so natural (and familiar from other Wii racing titles) and it takes just a few moments to get the ‘feel’ for it. Nothing sweeter than lounging back deep in the couch and racing away.

The online aspect is where this game is going to shine. This is worth the price alone. Racing people from around the world is a blast – complete with a scoring/rating points system. I didn’t check out the online battle mode, but it also has the scoring/rating system in place. It looks like they’ll be doing tournaments in the future and already you can see record-holding times from your country or worldwide and compare your times. You can even download ghosts of record holding runs to study or race against. It just feels like there’s so much potential there – more than any Wii game to date.

This looks to be a HUGE time waster for me. Don’t expect me to get much done online anytime soon – I’ll be racing.

I play as Gonchar – big surprise. If any of you guys score the game, drop me a line with your friend code if you’re feeling froggy.

I gotta get to bed, school in the morning (for the kids, not me) and more Mario Kart!

UPDATE – I’ve since had the chance to check out the online battle mode and it’s even more addictive than the online racing. My kids can’t turn the damn game off, I’m staying up until all hours of the night playing kids in Japan, it’s Mario Kart Mania around here.

Definitely worth the price, but avoid this one unless you have large chunks of life to give to the game.