Woo, a Costco opened up nearby this week. I kinda want to check it out, although I’m not sure that I want to be a member. In fact, I’m not exactly sure how Costco works, although I go to one all the time whenever I am visiting my parents. For those that don’t know, it’s like a Sam’s Club where you can buy gigantic-sized versions of most foods and goods. Sometimes they have great deals on clothing or electronics as well. It’s pretty fun to browse, although I can’t see Bunky and I consuming any of the huge portions that they sell.
I think it will be good for the area, also, as all articles about the company point to its disciplined and deliberate approach, as well as its very good treatment of employees.
This morning was initially filled with great excitement as important news circulated around the office. Apparently, Qdoba is offering all of our company’s employees “free” (really $6 off, but still excellent) meals until March 31. For obvious reasons, this sounds really impressive.
One massive burrito later, though, and I highly doubt I could eat at Qdoba for an entire month. Even once a week might be pushing it. The food is much too rich. I could do plain subs for a month easily, but I just can’t see myself cramming pseudo-Mexican food down every day.
Amusingly, there can be no charges under a dollar at the store, and I didn’t have any cash. I offered to pay for a coworker’s meal as well and we could only get the total price up to about $0.94. I had to buy a drink just to be able to charge the meal to my card, which was rather silly; they wouldn’t allow me to just get $1.00 charged to the card.
Uggggh, recently I’ve been having problems getting things delivered to our condo. I’m not sure what is with DHL and Fedex, but lately they’ve been failing me. Fedex apparently could not get into our building, and we had to pick up the package from their facility. What was supposed to be 2nd day delivery effectively turned into next week pick up.
Bunky and I were told our building is hard to get into. This is not true. Other than the guard sharks with frickin’ laser beams on their head, it’s pretty easy to deliver a package. UPS and USPS have no problems. The inside lobby has a sign next to the call box with instructions on how to reach the building manager, who can receive packages. As for getting into the parking lot, even if you didn’t know the number (and I think they should put a sign out by the parking gate also), you can just park in the ungated lot and walk over to the front door. It’s seriously less than 10 parking spaces away. Some people have longer driveways.
Anyway, I’ve been trying to get a power adapter for the laptop. These Dell adapters are teh sux, and from the pages of bad reviews, it seems the problem is widespread. They rarely last longer than a year, and consistently flake out. Unfortunately, you have to get proprietary cords, and you can’t really use the laptop without a way to charge the laptop. DHL failed me in it’s “next day” delivery, and now it’s been 5 days since I was supposed to receive the package. They didn’t even leave those attempted delivery stickers. I called both DHL and Dell to complain, and Dell refunded me the $16 shipping charge. That’s nice, but I’d rather have gotten the cord the next day.
So the TV stand arrived yesterday and it was time to put everything together. It actually took quite a while to get everything to work.
- Braved the wiring and set up the stand. The stand has new furniture smell, which made crawling around inside rather unpleasant.
- Lugged the huge 40″ TV onto the stand. It was easy to get ouf of the box, and it is just sooooo beautiful. The Bravia is a pleasing silver, with kinda a clear glass edge. I was very scared that I might drop it.
- Got the Comcast cable box authorized to receive HDTV.
- Had to go back to the Apple store because I had bought an HDMI-HDMI cord, but I needed a HDMI-DVI cord, since the cable box only had a DVI port out.
- Plugged everything together, turned on the TV, chagned to channel 3, switched the input to “cable box” and auto-scanned the channels. All I am getting is a really crappy broadcast of the Maury Provich show… this sucks.
- Apparently I need to specify which of the NINE different external outputs I am using. After a lot of messing around, I realize that input 8 is the one to use. There are 3 HDMI ports in, but port 3 is on the side (so cords stick out), and port 7 does not have in ports for the L and R sound cables. I thought it odd that this sweet new technology doesn’t integrate sound, but if I knew more it would probably make sense.
- FINALLY everything works. Once I got everything plugged in correctly, the TV got all the channels without needing to scan. I have to adjust the settings to “Standard” from the obnoxious “Vivid” and “Dynamic” settings they use in the store.
Normal TV still looks quite good, especially with the much larger screen. The whole setup looks very elegant. Surprisingly, with all the elegance of the TV, the remote felt kinda cheap and crappy (although it is logical and works well enough). There aren’t a ton of HD channels available, but shifting from an HD channel to a normal channel definitely makes a difference. It takes a second or so to change resolutions all the time as well, which is a minor annoyance.
The majority of the HD content so far seems to be sports and music. Sports look awesome in HD, which doesn’t really help Bunky that much. We were excited to discover a HD music channel, but instead of showing normal videos, it mostly shows live performances and special videos that have been ripped from DVDs that artists put out. So while we will be checking some of the HD channels out, it doesn’t look like we will be ditching the non-HD broadcasts anytime soon.
As for what people look like on HD… very different. Sometimes closeups are much too close now, cause you can see pores and stuff. Makeup doesn’t look the same at all, and a lot of people look really sweaty. Not really the kind of stuff I was looking for in HD…
General | Kabitzin 3/9/2007 | 
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