Rumblings and mumblings from a bumbling…something.

October 27, 2004

Last week I came across a deal online where Dell was offering substantial savings on its line of laptops. Now, normally I wouldn’t want to spend that much for a laptop (and indeed, I’ve been pricing laptops for the last year and a half at around $1500), but since the quarter was coming to the end and they needed to meet their sales goals, they had come up with a deal that impressed and tempted even me: $750 off a laptop when you spend $1500 or more. That’s right, half off. I priced the laptop I wanted, I had it in my cart and I was ready to check out, but alas, the coupon had expired at 6 AM that morning. I had missed out on the deal.

All for the best, I guess. I didn’t have $750 to spend at that moment in time, but Dell offers good financing and a deal where if you can pay off the balance by a certain date, you don’t pay any interest. I could have tightened my belt for awhile and paid it off over a period of six months or so easily. The laptop I have now is really starting to show its age, and I’ve been hoping that I could afford a new one for quite some time now, but this just wasn’t meant to be.

But it was a hell of a deal.

I did pull a couple of good things from it, though. The laptop I’ve been looking at for the last year or so from Dell has just about everything I could want, though I found another model they offer that has EVERYTHING I want and for the same price, so at least I have a different model to keep my eye on.

I decided the other day that I had had enough with my chair that I use in front of my computer. When I moved in with my sister, my computer chair had just broken and was no longer comfortable and literally on the verge of collapse. Since I was unemployed, though, I had no choice but to make do with all I had t the time–a canvas director’s chair that I was given fro my birthday many years ago. It’s fairly comfy, but it doesn’t have casters, sags and bends under my weight, and the wooden armrests irritate my elbows. The fact that it sags isn’t really a critique of my weight, rather, it’s a critique of a canvas chair being used for long periods of time.

So anyway, I began looking at desk chairs this week after my game-a-thon this past weekend, and I came to the conclusion that I could easily afford a new desk chair, but that it would be out of place and in the way in my room the way it is currently arranged. So I started thinking of a way to rearrange my room. THEN I decided that heck, I could get a better desk for myself while I’m at it! The desk I’m using now is a hand-me-down from my Mom and she’s using MY old computer desk, and while it’s satisfactory as a computer desk, as a workstation where I can keep things I need handy, have a writing surface, etc, it sadly fails miserably. I had the opportunity recently to hand write soemthing of great length, and I had to pull my keyboard completely off my desk to get any room, and even then I didn’t have much space to write.

So I looked at desks, too. I knew that I would be ordering online because places like Office Depot offer coupons that can only be used online, but since their in-store inventory is frequently identical to their online inventory, I was able to find good choices and then check them out in the Office Depot store that’s either near my work or near my apartment. I ended up finding a nice-looking corner workstation with a all of room, space for a large monitor, plenty of shelves for other stuff, and best of all, a lot of surface area for writing and storage. The desk I ended up with can be viewed here, and the chair I chose can be viewed here. With the coupon I used ($30 off $150), I only forked over $180, and with free delivery I’ll have it on Thursday.

Naturally, this means I’ll have to completely rearrange my room, something that is not easily done in my current living arrangements. I fear moving my TV and electronics equipment due to all the cables behind it. Not that they’ll get tangled or something, but that I’ll have to unhook them and then reattach everything. On the bright side, though, I’m going to reduce some fo the clutter in my room. With a larger desk, I can move more things over to it and pull them out of the closet, off my dresser, etc. I can bring over my stereo from my Mom’s house because there will be room on the top shelf of the desk for it. I can even get rid of a whole piece of furniture that’s just standing around holding things that have no other place to go. My only real concern, though, is where my bed goes. I could actually leave it in the current location if I wanted to, but then I wouldn’t be able to sit on my futon and watch TV because my desk is going where my TV currently is. Eh, I guess I’ll just have to get the desk assembled and see what arrangement shakes loose from my masterful Tetris-playing brain.

I’ve been haggling with TiVo for the last couple of weeks in order to straighten out why I haven’t gotten my $50 rebate that I was promised when I first signed up for the service, and I finally got it straightened out today. I’ve had nothing but good luck with both TiVo as a product and TiVo as a service so far, but these rebate hassles really pissed me off. I had mailed in all the required information for the rebate, and when I hadn’t heard anything about it I checked with the largest TiVo forums on the Internet to see if other people were having the same problems. Indeed they were. The company that TiVo had paid to deal with the rebates was dragging its feet like most companies dealing with large cash rebates, hoping that people would either forget or just get fed up and throw their hands in the air. Mainly, people were complaining that information that had been sent was reported missing (i.e., barcodes, service numbers, etc).

So after going back and forth with the company’s customer service reps via email and not hearing anything back from several emails, I did a little research, found out the information I was missing (my TiVo service number, something I’m almost certain I included in the first place), and called them up to give them the missing number. Thank goodness it wasn’t something like the barcode since the packaging has long since been recycled and I didn’t make a copy of it. Yeah, yeah, I should have, but I thought that TiVo would handle this themself.

At least my $50 rebate was approved. After all, that was the whole impetus for picking up the TiVo in the first place since it was such a good deal. Well, that and the reputation of excellence the service has. I read a bit ago that TiVo and Nielson are teaming up so that Nielson can find out if people are skipping over the commercials (like I do…six or seven clicks of the 30 second commericial skip and I’m back to the program), and I’m wondering what impact that may have on my ability to skip commericials in the future.

Remember kids, if you want to get a TiVo of your own, I would be grateful if you’d use me as your referral tot he service. I get points for that, and points can become merchandise for me. So act now!

One of the reasons I stayed with AT&T Wireless is that Cingular bought them out and I was looking forward to, well, better service. Apparently that will constitute a change of the service agreement, though, which all paying subscibers must approve of. However, I’m told (but have not yet gotten confirmation of) that if you don’t agree with the service agreement change, you’re able to say no, you don’t approve, and walk away from the service. Without paying a breach of service fee if this is done before your contract runs out. Now, this isn’t a big deal to me since I’m relatively happy with my service, and even if I had the ability to switch to another carrier at will I’d have to buy a new phone. AT&T, however, was recently offering a sweet deal where you could get a $320 phone for free if you upgraded to it and renewed your contract. I thought about it, but that would have put my contract at 21 months instead of the 9 I have left. If I’d known about the whole “able to walk away from your contract without paying any fees” thing, I would have taken that offer if only to get a nice new free phone. The one I have is nice, does everything I want, but I’d really like to be able to take pictures, y’know? Camera phones are just so handy.

On a somewhat related note, yesterday at work I noticed that my phone said it in Cingular range and not AT&T Wireless. When I got home it was back to AT&T, and now here at work it says AT&T again and not Cingular. Guess they’re starting the switchover early.

I’ve used the last two days to catch up on things I should have accomplished days, weeks, even months ago. I finally called my grandmother to thank her for her birthday present to me since she was the only one I didn’t thank in person already, I called to schedule my car for its routine service checkup, called USAA to see about a break on my rates since I turned 25, called the company that makes the alarm in my car to see if I could find out the model number, things like that. Landmark Ford wants to charge me $355 for a 30,000 mile service on my car, but I’ve only been driving it for six months–I think I can skate on most of the stuff they want to do to my car and get by with just an oil change, tire rotation, fluid check, etc. Much more reasonable since I’ve only put about 1500-2000 miles on the car since I got it.

In any case, that about wraps it up for now. Oh yes, and I voted yesterday. Oregon is all absentee ballots, so we get to vote early. Now that I’ve voted, I plan on completely distancing myself from all topics of political discussion until next Tuesday at the very earliest. Not only am I out of things to talk about, but my role is complete. I figure since I’ve voted, I can shut up for the time being.

Catch you all later.

Posted in Geekery, General