purchases - Lord Gonchar

Please allow me to introduce myself, I'm a man of wealth and taste.

Another Gadget Bites The Dust

I just finished uploading my music collection to Google Music. I think this officially makes my iPod a paperweight. The only thing I was really using it for was when I mow the lawn, but now my phone can access that same music.

The other place I expected to possibly use it (but hadn’t yet) was the car. The Camaro is pretty connected that way and there’s a USB port in it. If you hook up the iPod, you can control it from the radio. I never really used it because I was usually playing with XM. The XM trial ended a little while back and I was on the fence about renewing. It was cool and I had waited long enough to get the $77 offer, but there were only a few channels I really listened to regularly.

Google Music on my phone encouraged me to check out the Camaro’s Bluetooth Audio feature. I’m glad I did. If terrestrial radio isn’t sufficient, I’ll just use my phone. Between Pandora, the iheartradio app and Google Music, I have access to my entire personal music collection, radio from around the country and ‘personalized’ stations based on my preferences. Sorry, XM. I have no need for you.

And the phone can just stay in my pocket or console and I can snag calls with the hands-free feature. Pretty cool stuff.

In all honesty, I never really loved the iPod. I wanted to, but it’s one of the few tech/gadget/electronic purchases I sort of always regretted. It’s a unitasker gadget and that’s unacceptable and archaic (see my Kindle hate – sorry, Jeff). If a device I own can do the same thing at least mostly as well, there’s no need to a standalone device. That standalone device has to be pretty exceptional. The main thing the iPod had going for it was that it was my music specifically as opposed to music I like including some specific songs. Google Music just took care of that.

Best part is, today is also my renew date for a new phone. Looks like Santa just might be leaving me a shiny new phone (any advice on an Android phone?) this year. The timing feels right.

This Weekend

For the past few years, we’ve gotten a real tree for Christmas. Basically, since we moved to Ohio. They always suck. We vowed last year to pick up a nice artificial tree this year/ Ideally, we want a really tall one that we can put in the entry way. We kind of unofficially figured a 12-foot tree would be cool. Seems to be the point where the prices are still reasonable, but it’s tall enough to be something (I measured – the entry in 17 feet high). It’s about time we started finding one – and it turns out it’s not as easy as it seems to find a combo of reasonable cost and quality in a really tall artificial tree. But that’s for another post.

So to start thinking Xmas and maybe start scoping trees we decided to go check out our local Christmas Tree Shoppe. We knew a little about it and had been wanting to check the place out for a while. Well, our mistake for not looking into it more, but it’s probably the worst place in the world. I expected a cute little seasonal holiday-type place. It’s actually essentially a Big Lots with 1/4 of the store filled with seasonal holiday items of the Big Lots quality you’d expect. It fucking sucked. If it burned to the ground tomorrow, I’d chuckle with approval. I actually wished I were in a Big Lots. (for the record, Big Lots is one of my least favorite places on Earth)

Just a big fucking waste of time.

We noticed there was a Burlington Coat Factory in the plaza. We hadn’t been to one in ages, but we used to find pretty great deals at the one in Allentown when we lived there.

Mistake #2.

It smelled…mostly like sad. And there was absolutely nothing worth seeing there…except (and I swear we found these there) for the boys mustard yellow courduroy pants straight off the kids in early-70′s Sesame Street episodes. I had flashbacks.

We quickly slipped out of there and beelined to the other location we planned on hitting – Hobby Lobby. I don’t think I’d ever stepped foot in one prior to this. We saw an ad that said they had a buttload of trees in all shapes and sizes at great prices. It may have been a bit of an oversell. They had one 12-footer, but it didn’t look very real and was a bit bare…and even with the 50% off sale on all Christmas decorations, still came in at a price closer to four digits than two. Meh.

What a waste of a couple of Friday hours.

On Satuday, we had football equipment turn-ins in the morning, then my son and I decided to drive across town to see one of the semi-final tournament games. Looked to be possibly the best game of the entire tournament at the 4th grade level. One team was a sleeper that went undefeated and gave up just one touchdown in the 8-game season and only two TD’s in three tournament games. No one ever put up more than 6 against them. They were playing the team that has been a thorn in our side not just once, but twice in the past. They’re consistently good and passed us in the final week of the season for the highest scoring team in the 4th grade.

On paper it was the unstoppable force against the immovable object.

It didn’t play out that way. The sleeper team gave up 28 points. In one game they gave up more TD’s than they had total in the 11 games prior. We still had fun. Might go to the championship game at UD next weekend.

It was also my daughter’s birthday. I have a 14 year old. Her party was last weekend, so she got to spend the day alone while my wife was at work and my son and I were at the game. She got a cake from Ritters. She wanted a Mud Pie cake. Too chocolatey for me. A weird little quirk of mine is that I’m not fond of chocolate ice cream. Even worse, chocolate ice cream with more chocolate shit mixed in…and then topped with more chcocolate. Not my thing. But Ritters is awesome. It took us a while to discover them (we’re DQ people for childhood), but we haven’t been to DQ in ages. (for the record my very favorite ice cream is Whitehouse)

Tomorrow? Little stuff around the house and a Steelers game tomorrow night. Normally we rake/blow leaves the first weekend in November, but all the leaves haven’t fallen yet. Trees are still surprisingly full for this late in the year. Maybe next weekend.

I’m livin’ it.

November 6th, 2011 - food - football - fun - life - purchases - the kids - weather

Advertising To Customers

Noticed that lately the ads I’m seeing online all seem to be for places/products/services/websites I already frequent/purchase/use.

I get the idea of showing me ads that are relevant to me and what I do, but it seems pretty funny that I’m getting ads for things that (for all intents and purposes) I’m already a ‘customer’ of. I suppose it doesn’t hurt, but with the narrow focus that advertising is capable of I’m not sure it’s money well spent to show me things I already do/own/buy.

One of the funniest ones, for example, are the constant 300×250 ads for the Camaro that I seem to get bombarded with on websites of all kinds. I bought one three months ago. What is gained by showing me Camaro advertising?

September 29th, 2011 - purchases - weird

Attention Whoring With The Car

So after a month, I can say the car is definitely a head-turner. We get waves, thumbs up, stares, and all kinds of lookie loos. We still find fingerprints on the windows after coming out of a store. Earlier this week we were out and an old black dude driving a delivery van of some kind caught my wife’s attention at a red light and mouthed, “Nice car” as he pulled ahead of us in the next lane. The best part was that there was another Camaro two cars ahead of us and he slid right past it. The classic black is sharp, no doubt about it.

The down side is that people think you’re some kind of car guy with something to prove. I like the car. I like the performance. I like the styling. However, my cock is more than adequate and I don’t need to show you how fast my car goes. Too many times someone with something kinda sporty (tons of Mustangs in my neck of the woods) pulls up next to you at a light and you can feel them looking. Then it turns green and they start hard. Not necessarily full blown, “Go!” but more of a test to see if you’ll bite. 9 times out of 10 I don’t. Sometimes I do because it’s fun. This past weekend I had a bunch of kids (they were young could’ve been 16, could’ve been 18, could’ve been 21 – no idea) pull up beside us in a Honda or Subaru or some shit with a big tall spoiler on the back. They rolled up slow and were totally looking at the car. He was inching and I knew he was trying to be all cool. When the light turned green I hit the gas a bit more than I normally would have and the kid just punched it, so I said, “Fuck it” and did the same. There wasn’t much room as traffic was ahead and I didn’t notice how fast we got going (couldn’t have been more than 70 – the whole thing lasted 8 seconds tops), but I’m sure he caught shit from his buddies in the car for being blown away by some middle aged dude in a backwards baseball cap and his wife and kids.

Yes, the kids were in the back, but we were on our way to buy fireworks so…two wrongs make a right – or something.

So yeah, it’s been an interesting month with the car. Still happy as shit with our decision.

July 9th, 2011 - awesome - insight - purchases - ridiculous

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