3 posts tagged “sol”

I will begin by saying I'm not one of your hardened shoppers who stalks and waits for the deals and such... I just went mainly as I wanted to gift Sol and Aurelia their presents early for Christmas. The line was terribly long... We all waited in line by the loading docks at about 4:45am in the chill cold. Personally, I regretted not wearing my wool coat out as I froze pretty quickly. We all were talking about some of the old times in our lives and trying to laugh to forget the bitter cold. Once 5:00am hit, the store opened the flood gates... What I witnessed was pure animal-like shopping chaos. People shuffling, mass hoarding items, waiting like cattle to get claim checks for high demand items... It was something that would get companies like OSHA concerned.

The art of Black Friday shopping has seriously evolved since the advent of new consumer technologies. I saw many people with mobile phones trying to have other family members triangulate items together to rendezvous at a central point to ensure they would get the best sale items. Some power shoppers had their Bluetooth headsets on so both hands could focus on grabbing items... Of course with human nature, you had people yielding to their territorial instincts of hoarding items and fighting with others over a single material item because it was the last one on sale. The local police were on hand to handle things like major riots, which I didn't see any of those luckily.

My main purpose was to try picking up a 4GB Memory Stick Pro Duo ($29.99) for my PSP for movie purposes but well, that was a failure as they changed the deal to a 2GB model for $17.99. Though my main purpose was to to get Bluetooth headsets for cheap to give to Aurelia and Sol for an early Christmas. They are two people who are on the phone quite a bit with their friends and complaining about how their hand or neck hurts from all the talking they do. Sol ended up getting the exact same model Bluetooth headset as me for his phone. He was a bit limited in his choices due to his phone being an older model Sony Ericsson P910i, so I got him the HBH-V705 which is a nice, sleek model with a very professional polish to its look. I managed to snag that for 50% off which was an awesome kill! Aurelia was hoping for the slick Jabra headset she had her heart on, but well she found a Plantronic MiX tower that had more female oriented headsets there. She would get the MiX 330 which is a remix of the original Plantronics Explorer 330 with a white and silver body color and adorned with Swarovski crystals. The MiX 330 ended up being $20 off so it was not too bad. They both were stoked for me to front for their gifts, which ultimately made me happy.

I was not about to leave empty handed, I wanted to see if I could pick up a PSP title for cheap. I found the last copy of Guilty Gear Judgment (with the bonus Guilty Gear XX #reload) and a screen protector for normal price, but it should be plenty fun for when I need my "fighter" or "beat-em-up" fix. While the game was not popular, it beats the imported edition from Japan where Judgment and Guilty Gear XX #reload were both separate game UMD's at $30 - $40 a disc.

Everyone walked out happy, which I was thankful for. Sure, we waited in bitter cold for about close to an hour to get in the shop, but the "spoils of war" were grand. The expensive part of my gifting is done, but the last will come in 2 weeks when I go shopping at Strapya World for everyone else. I just want to put some good karma in the pool for all of those who've supported me when I was down. Not all things can be had at Black Friday, however...

This year, I have noticed that the deals were mediocre rather than spectacular in the paper/in-store ads. The online shops are finally getting better with their "ads" or Thanksgiving sales. Apple did their sale online with slashing prices about $300 here and their on their machines. Newegg has continued on with their tradition as usual. Some shops like Best Buy and Target has some "ONLINE ONLY" specials that you simply couldn't rush to the store for. I feel the next step forward will only be a fusion of both sorts of sales for places that have a physical store front... But at the same rate, they need to make sure the servers can handle the loads of shoppers pounding the servers. I was unable to get in on a deal at Frys.com for the 4GB Memory Stick Pro Duo as the server kept timing out, but on finally being able to... the server had a MySQL error preventing the transaction from going on any further. Oh well, there's always next time.

If you had a CD or album coming out, who would you thank in the liner notes?

I want to make a hypothetical liner note for the posed question.

ZeroXR's Thanks: I'd like to thank a few special people who helped me with this album. Sol, you're my dear cousin and you have always been one to push me to the limit. Thanks man for being there in my tough times with family. Alice, my sister, you're always one to put a stupid grin on my face. Thanks for the laughs when things looked glum to me, I appreciate it a lot. Schpenke, thanks for being a mentor to me for the times I couldn't sort out my own mind. It's such a simple thing, but my thanks probably don't do it justice. I'd like to thank my pharmacist Ken for being a great teacher in helping me chisel and develop myself as a human being. Greg, I cannot even begin to thank you for inspiring me to push my best and even more... Giving me the power to believe in myself again even when life just completely tore me apart. Then there's that one special person... You know who you are... Thanks for being a great person.

Of all the people I would thank, those are the few I deem as the best folks in my life. My sister and cousin are probably the only direct blood relations that I have the most sympathy for. They are my blood and blood is thicker than wine. My teachers and mentors I appreciate as they have helped push me harder to evolving. Without them, I wouldn't know how to progress forward. To that special someone, they have been there for a while... We have had our differences, but eventually we knew that compromise is the great thing that helps us move forward.

Last night... Boy, that was fun! I was at my cousin Sol's home and we were being geeks as usual. My sister, Alice had finished using my aunt's old Sony Vaio to browse the web and well, she had wanted to use MSN. There was an implication that made things painful... The system isn't strong enough to run a lot of programs. She got a message that the Vaio couldn't connect with the last copy of MSN Messenger (that was officially called Messenger, not Live! Messenger). Let's break here and I'll introduce you to my 2 closest family members...

Sol is a dear cousin to me. He is a power user, so he's no slouch on computer bugs, viruses, worms and the like. He's officially ripped the family PC gamer title from me, by being a World of Warcraft player (Elune server). He has learned a lot of his basic computer security knowledge from me teaching him, in addition to observing me jury-rig things to work. He takes a lot of my values and thoughts to heart as my family says I seem to be a positive influence to him. His machines of choice are a slick HP laptop powered by Altec Lansing built-in speakers with an AMD Turion 64-bit processor and an ATi Mobility Radeon for his graphics and a Sony Vaio media PC loaded Pentium 4 Hyper Threading system with a Geforce 5200 series card (aftermaket upgrade) and dual DVD burner drives.

Alice is the average, haphazardly average computer user who lives dangerously with regards to computer use. She's also the same one that got Beast V2 hit by a load of viruses and reduced to rubble... She's the trend jumper as she will jump on technology trends as friends mention them to her, this includes security related issues as well. She was never one to heed my advice until it's too late and that doesn't seem to be changing any time soon. Thankfully she's been pleased with Apple's OS X, although she wants Windows Vista... (ugh... Her Windows XP problems are bad enough.) Her machines of choice are an old school G4 iBook laptop and a Sony Vaio media PC with a similar build to Sol's machine, but with a Geforce 4 MX440 64mb RAM.