Written 22 January, 2008
It's Christmas All Over Again!
Last year was a lean year for your very own Cheyenne, and 2008 promises more of the same (but my finances change in early 2009, and woo hoo! Watch me then!
But I came into a little money recently and was able to give my computer a belated Christmas present.
I took myself to Fry's, which you might know, is a big-box electronics store. It's head and shoulders ahead of, IMHO, Circuit City and Comp-USA and Best Buy. There are 100-foot-long aisles dedicated to things like computer cases and keyboards and a 20-foot long display of flash drives and stacks of hard drives on sale. There is a 50-foot-long display of motherboards and bins of inexpensive cables of every type and an area the size of Rhode Island dedicated to computer books. Fry's has everything! And there is one only 15 miles from my house, which almost but doesn't quite make living in Atlanta worthwhile.
I found an 500 GB Maxtor hard drive on sale for $89.95 and picked up a 512mb nVidia 8xxx video card with DDR2 for $60 (after $30 rebate) and two USB external 3.5" hard drive enclosures for $19 each (they didn't work, have to take them back, which is a great excuse to buy more stuff). I got a nifty little stand-on-your desk tripod for $12.95, which will allow me to uninstall my crappy Logitech webcam that routinely crashes my PC and install a slighly less crappy Logitech webcam which I just wasn't able to position.
I passed up, with more than one backwards glance, the wall of monitors and the Macintosh aisle (there's a nice desktop Mac for $799 that is calling my name, but it will have to wait).
I also grabbed a cordless Skype phone for only $29.95. That will let me talk to my Sweetie without being deskbound.
I love Skype. It's so much clearer than the phone line.
As a last impulse purchase, I grabbed Daniel Terdiman's An Entrepreneur's Guide to Second Life, which was an ouch at $29, but was so well-done that I couldn't pass it up. I figured I would gain $30 in knowledge by reading it-- although that's let's see, $270 x 30, about 8000 Lindens, maybe not. :)
It was like a belated but happy Christmas, and I spent a happy time last night backing up all my data and making an image of my boot drive.
All of which got me to thinking--- hmmm. Christmas. Perhaps I should get a new coat!
It's Christmas All Over Again!
Last year was a lean year for your very own Cheyenne, and 2008 promises more of the same (but my finances change in early 2009, and woo hoo! Watch me then!
But I came into a little money recently and was able to give my computer a belated Christmas present.
I took myself to Fry's, which you might know, is a big-box electronics store. It's head and shoulders ahead of, IMHO, Circuit City and Comp-USA and Best Buy. There are 100-foot-long aisles dedicated to things like computer cases and keyboards and a 20-foot long display of flash drives and stacks of hard drives on sale. There is a 50-foot-long display of motherboards and bins of inexpensive cables of every type and an area the size of Rhode Island dedicated to computer books. Fry's has everything! And there is one only 15 miles from my house, which almost but doesn't quite make living in Atlanta worthwhile.
I found an 500 GB Maxtor hard drive on sale for $89.95 and picked up a 512mb nVidia 8xxx video card with DDR2 for $60 (after $30 rebate) and two USB external 3.5" hard drive enclosures for $19 each (they didn't work, have to take them back, which is a great excuse to buy more stuff). I got a nifty little stand-on-your desk tripod for $12.95, which will allow me to uninstall my crappy Logitech webcam that routinely crashes my PC and install a slighly less crappy Logitech webcam which I just wasn't able to position.
I passed up, with more than one backwards glance, the wall of monitors and the Macintosh aisle (there's a nice desktop Mac for $799 that is calling my name, but it will have to wait).
I also grabbed a cordless Skype phone for only $29.95. That will let me talk to my Sweetie without being deskbound.
I love Skype. It's so much clearer than the phone line.
As a last impulse purchase, I grabbed Daniel Terdiman's An Entrepreneur's Guide to Second Life, which was an ouch at $29, but was so well-done that I couldn't pass it up. I figured I would gain $30 in knowledge by reading it-- although that's let's see, $270 x 30, about 8000 Lindens, maybe not. :)
It was like a belated but happy Christmas, and I spent a happy time last night backing up all my data and making an image of my boot drive.
All of which got me to thinking--- hmmm. Christmas. Perhaps I should get a new coat!
1 comment:
OK... Jealousy does no one any good, but darn it, there's even less of what little there was in the way of computer stores here now. Looks like the CompUSA name is being used by Systemax (Tiger Direct?) now. I know there's a Tiger Direct store in the Chicago area... maybe they will consider setting up shop in Iowa.
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