Archive for April, 2006

I must be a damn idiot!

I’ve got some photos I wanted to post on the ol’ blog here. I don’t really wanna put them on my website, because I may be moving hosts soon and don’t wanna deal with all that. Anyway, I thought, “I’ll use this new Flickr thing I hear everyone raving about.” Those who know me know that I’m not much for the hype generated by new things. All these years after it launched, and I still don’t much care for google. I only use it because there’s not much else out there. Digg, Reddit, Ruby on Rails; I’ve looked at them all. None of them “do it” for me. I just don’t see the mystique. I shoulda taken that stance with Flickr, but I didn’t.

I’ve spent two (2) days trying to get those photos onto my blog, and I just can’t figure it out. The whole first day was wasted until told me you had to register your blog. Shit, I looked around that site all day and never saw a link to registering a blog. Nothing. Now I’ve spent another day trying, unsuccessfully, to put images on the blog. So far, I’ve managed to put A single image there, but I want several of them; to tell a story so-to-speak. If I can’t do that, it’s useless to me. I very seldom put up pics, and I usually don’t want to base an entire post around 1 pic.

Usually, my dreams are pretty sane. They mostly just consist of rehashing events that occurred to me lately. Saturday nights dream was really strange. The short gist of it is that I wrote and got published a cook book that was titled, “Better Cooking Through C++.”

I found this on a blog I read yesterday and thought it was kinda cool… It’s a photojournal of Israelie(sp?) women during their 2 year mandatory military service.

http://www.serialno3817131.com/

Last nights class consisted of warm ups, some kata, and partner drills. The partner drills were very “kung fu”-ish in nature. Sticky hands type drills. Stuff I’d seen before, but never done. It was kinda fun, and very tiring on the shoulders. Lots of good information was released by the instructors. Unfortunately, I think I only managed to catch a small portion of it.

Saturday’s workout might as well have been a matsubayashi workout. I spent the vast majority of my time working on the matsubayashi kata. I only made a brief foray into the shotokan kata to do 2 sochin, 2 kankusho, and one kankudai. Worked up a good sweat. Other than that, not much to say.

Tonights class was kinda soft. Sensei Walker and Mr. Koener were both absent, so one of the brown belts led class. He did an ok job, but he was put on the spot so he was a little unsure of himself. We did quite a bit of kata, and then we did some yakusoku kumite. Not horribly exciting, but I worked up a sweat.

Tonights class was fairly kick-ass. Sensei Walker led warm-ups from hell. Tons of ab work and lots of stretching. We moved next into some sparring combinations pretty rapid-fire. Next we partnered up and did the sparring combinations on our partners. I got across from Ed tonight and was able to do quite a few at pretty close to real life speed. All that took an hour to accomplish. After class, Mr. Koener spent some time going over some Chinese “sticky hands” type drills. They were quite interesting as well as very tiring. My shoulders are totally smoked!

Off to bed.

Saturday I went to train at the Mapleton dojo. It was a decent workout. I did quite a few bassaidai with the guys, then some heian on my own, followed up by some sochin with . Afterwards, Matt wanted to work on some sparring. I got the bright idea to try to bring out his inner pissed-off Tazmanian devil. To my chagrin, I think it worked. I now am wonderfully bruised up and down both sides of my ribs, as well as by right knee being swelled and bruised. I think it was productive though. He finally started fighting back the way he should be if he ever intends on taking his sandan test. Overall, it was a very good workout and I left with plenty of sweat and a good, old-fashioned ass kicking!

Thursday night’s class was… well… so-so. The class started off pretty good. Pretty heavy workout to start with, but we got off track. We started doing partner drills and knife defense drills. As seems to be a regular occurence here, things got a bit off track. It seemed like more people were standing around talking about doing the defenses rather than actually doing them. It was ok, though, because I did pick up some good information from the class to add to my repertoire.

No shit. My faith has been restored in retail America… or at least Best Buy. For those of you who do not know, my laptop died. The video card burnt out. I had put the thing in the closet, and I was starting to price laptops. I was fully intending to go out and drop 2 grand on a new laptop. The day before I was gonna go out shopping, Ann come into the office (the one in our house) and says, “hey… did you see this.”

She was holding a letter from Best Buy in her hand. A summary of the letter was basically, “hey, the 3 year warranty you purchased on your laptop is up in a little over a month. Do you wanna renew it?” WTF. Seriously! Neither Ann or I knew it, but we apparently purchased the 3 year extended warrany on the laptop when we purchased it 3 years ago for. Keep in mind, the extended warranty cost me $250 three years ago. The laptop cost me $2700 after tax.

The next day, I carried the beat up old beast laptop into Best Buy, plopped it down on the counter, and said, “it don’t work no more. The video card is burnt out.” The lady behind the counter looked at it and said something like, “wow, this is old. We don’t even sell this brand anymore.” She was very nice, courteous, and quick. She took all my information and said they would send it in and call me back in about 2 weeks. She also informed me that they might not be able to fix it, in which case they usually give you store credit. I thought, “yeah, right.”

One week later, Best Buy called. They told me the laptop was unserviceable, and that I should come into the store and “pick out a new laptop.” I couldn’t believe it, but I figured what the hey. So Ann and I drove to best buy. We presented our original receipt to the head of the Geek Squad and told him what the folks on the phone said. He looked up the info in their computer, smiled, and said, “all right! Go pick out a new computer.” I still couldn’t believe him, so we started asking questions.

He said that I couldn’t REALLY have store credit, because the extended warranties are actually insurance policies that go through AIG insurance. However, he said that I could go pick out any laptop I wanted as long as it didn’t exceed the original purchase price. I was hoping that I’d get actual store credit so that I could get a cheaper laptop and a flat screen tv for the bedroom as well; but I’m not complaining at this point.

I headed back to the laptops, where I was happily helped by 3 different sales people. You’d have thought that I was spending a million dollars in there instead of getting a free computer. Anyway, I discovered that the most expensive laptop that Best Buy sells is a full $500 less than what I had to spend. Yup, the baddest mutha they got is only $2000. It was a Sony Vaio. Dual Core Centrino with a 100gig Sata drive and 1 gig of memory. The 1 gig of memory is upgradeable to 2 gigs, but it only has 2 slots so the 2 gig would require me to replace the 2 512′s with 2 1gigs. The 2 1 gigs would run me another $300+ to buy. So, I headed back over to the Geek Squad guy and said, “hey, the most expensive one you got is 2 grand. Do you think you could throw in 2 1gig sticks to upgrade it to 2 gigs?” To my amazement, the guy simply said, “yeah. I can do that no problem.”

Thus, I picked out the brand new Sony Vaio with the 2 gig upgrade. I figured that they’d take the 512 that was in it for the trade, but they didn’t. They gave it to me. So, I’ve got 2 512 sticks of laptop memory if anyone can use it. I’ll give ya a good price on it ;p. Then, I figured, “fuck it.” I purchased the ultimate 3 year warranty on this bad boy. I got the warranty where I can kick this thing across the room while peeing on it, and they’ll replace it. If I could keep this up, it’d be possible to never actually buy another laptop again.

All and all, I walked out with this badboy, an extra gig of ram, and a 3 year warranty from hell for a whopping $200. I’d have to say that the $250 warranty paid for itself. Also, I have to give big props to the folks at Best buy. I had no less that 6, yep, count em’, 6 (head of the Geek Squad, a Geek Squad pleeb, 3 computer section salespeople, and a customer service girl) people waiting on me like I was a king. It was probably the best experience I’ve ever had at Best Buy.

p.s. They even took $16 off my total because I paid more tax in Illinois when I bought my laptop 3 years ago. I just couldn’t believe that!