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Christmas Eve and Computer Tales
Christmas Eve 2002 - 8:24 p.m.
I'm Currently Avoiding: Any Contemplation Whatsoever of Returning to ClassI still have this amazing desire to hear 'The Carol of the Bells' for some reason. No idea why, though. So it's Christmas Eve and some song with something to do with Christmas Eve is faintly floating through my head, which is something that I don't need. Especially since it's floating so lightly through it that I can't really discern the melody or the words. It's sort of driving me nuts. Oh well, not like I wasn't there already as it was.
I had all my packages for Christmas presents prior to this, but I didn't wrap them until just this evening. Because I'm a filthy procrastinator, yes I am. Ha. At least I'm not trying to buy Christmas presents tonight. We did the normal thing of Christmas Eve church service followed by coming home and having Oyster Soup. it's something of a tradition in my family to do that. I didn't eat it though. I don't really like oyster soup so my sister and I had New England Clam Chowder instead. Courtesy of Campbells. The oyster soup is always homemade. Doesn't mean I like it though. The service was nice...and they always do this thing where everybody has a candle and near the end they light them one at a time until everyone's candle is lit. Then they turn off the lights and sing "Silent Night". It's fun. I think all the presents will be opened tomorrow. We're going to go visit my...great-uncle I think tomorrow. Which is an unusual detour from what normally happens. Normally everyone comes over to this house and we have dinner followed by present-opening. Oh, and there was peppermint icecream for dessert which is another holiday-time tradition of sorts for no explicable reason I can recall.
Oh. I suppose you're all waiting with bated breath for my description of my new computer (or not, but let's pretend that you are). Okay, sooo...The Mall of America was completely unhelpful in my computer search. I mean, honestly, you'd think the biggest mall in America would let me find what I'm looking for, right? NO. That is not the case. What I found for laptops in the Mall of America:
Radioshack: Only sold like 1 Compaq laptop. (NOTE: I absolutely loathe Compaq and will purchase another one of their laptops when Hell freezes over, pigs fly, and the Earth's gravity is completely reversed and everybody flies off into outer space.)
Sears: 1 Compaq, 1 Sony Vaio that was something like a ridiculous $1400.
Circuit City Express: Did Not even sell computers!
Admittedly, there was an entire store devoted to Apple computers and other sundry Apple products which is all well and good...if I liked Macs at all, that is, which I don't. All in all, I was fairly disappointed. Annoyed even. So I was rather resigned to simply finding one in the limited options here at home as we drove in the direction of home. As we were driving, I saw a BestBuy! I was happy. So I told my mom to take the next exit to go visit the Best Buy, which put us on some other weird highway kind of road and we sort of not really got slightly lost. I found Best Buy again though (would've found it sooner if my mother would've *listened* to me when I told her to turn at that light...) and after some finagling with traffic and stuff, we finally arrived at Best Buy which was quite busy because it was the 21st of December. Anyway, I was trying to decide between three laptops, two Toshibas and a Sony Vaio. Eventually I decided on the more expensive Toshiba (not as expensive as it should have been given that there was something like $600 in rebates attached to the price of it), which was a 2.0 gigabyte Pentium 4 chip, 40 gb harddrive, dvd/cd-rw, 15 inch screen, etc., etc., etc. It was a very nice laptop. Unfortunately, they were out of stock. And they didn't have them online, and they were all out of them in place x,y,& z. They did have five of them in a BestBuy that was down the road someplace though. Normally, they'd just send someone over to get one and I'd be sitting pretty, but they were so busy that they couldn't really spare anyone to make the trip. So she was going to give me directions and call ahead to have one held for me. Instead, however, as an alternate option, she said that she could give me $50 off the computer price if I'd purchase their extended service plan which works for something like 3 years I believe. After my experience with my *last* (piece of shit) laptop, I decided that this was an excellent idea and went that way.
So what did I end up with? I ended up with the Sony Vaio I'd been contemplating before deciding on the Toshiba. What exactly? Well, pretty much this except for about $300 less than that (well, $100 less than that after the extended service warranty thing was paid for). So far I like it fairly well. I played a dvd on it and that came out nicely. The only point where my life is going to get difficult is when it comes to compatability issues with various programs and peripherals I had prior to purchasing this computer that now have to get along happily with XP. Damn XP. At least so far I haven't had it freeze or anything so it seems fairly stable (for now at any rate), which is good, but I'm not looking forward with trying to make it work with things like my printer and my digital camera as well as software I liked previously. So far I've discovered that the program I'd been using to edit webpages doesn't work with XP and that the program I'd been using to kill pop-up ads doesn't work with it either. At least, it says that it's not available to work with this operating system and I have no reason to believe that they're lying. This is a pain in the ass. Also, I need to transfer my files and things from my old computer to my new one and I don't really have much of any idea how to go about doing so. Ugh. So that's it for problems thus far. More later as they occur to me. I'm going to go do something that isn't on the internet now I think.
Ciao.
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