We were strolling through a mall with my in-laws about a month ago and my father in law pointed out the irony of this sign.
If I ever own a store, remind me not to advertise to customers about our most expensive prices ever!
Or at least, remind me to hire someone (my wife’s good at it!) to proofread the materials!
Because it’s a guarantee, I wonder if I were to buy something (hypothetically), if the price went up would I have to return it and pay the higher price to keep them honest?
Saw this sign the other day at Wal-Mart…apparently they want me to head to their demo table and try out some toilet paper. Really? You really want me to sample it there? What language did the person that put this up speak, anyway? Darn funny, though :-)
(click for full-size version)
This is a very cool photo on Flickr, and popular with almost 200,000 views! Plus, I really like Velcro :-)
While we were in Holland, we ate Italian two nights in a row (at the same restaurant), and this is one of my meals (minus a quarter of it :-) It was pretty good! Plus, I’m testing a new Zooomr account (similar to Flickr in many ways…but different) and they’re giving away free pro accounts to bloggers who display a photo from them in their blogs :-)
In case you were wondering what the ring looks like, here it is :-)
You can see more pictures on Flickr in this set!
Vegas was great, but it’s so good to be home! I love lots of things that are in my life, and people that are in my life. It’s a good time to be alive, and God is good. And sometime, I’ll be able to share a bit more of it. For now, you get to read whatever I feel like putting here (well, you’ll always get that, it just might not be as interesting as my life actually is :-)
I got my camera, and it’s really cool. Haven’t had much time to play with it yet! Also they didn’t send me an adapter ring that I need to use the lenses I got, but they’re sending me one for free that will hopefully be here next week (never depend on specific timing from the USPS!). So I haven’t been able to play with the macro lens that I was looking foward to…not like I’ve had time anyway, so I suppose it’s all working out :-)
I have two friends that have actually uploaded a significant amount of stuff to “Flickr”:http://www.flickr.com/ now! Takes time, but eventually I bring people around to the latest and greatest I’ve found :-) Sometimes ;-)
Also…I didn’t know until I read one of the blogs I keep up with that “Adobe bought Macromedia”:http://robert.accettura.com/archives/2005/04/18/adobe-buys-macromedia/! Very interesting, but makes sense. I’m sure we’ll hear more soon!
Well, the pictures from yesterday, all several hundred of them, should have been uploaded overnight but the Flickr uploader tool kept timing out. A few uploaded, which you can “see here”:http://www.flickr.com/photos/existdifferently/sets/244083/ for now, I’ll add to the set and post here when I get a chance to upload the rest. Unfortunately the ones that did get posted (since I’m posting in chronological order approximately, at least by memory card) are from the NAB conference, and not from The Strip at night, which I also got a lot of! Some not as blurry this time :-)
We went go-karting last night on some go-karts that look like your average local fun park go-karts, but they weren’t speed-limited and could go up to 40 MPH! We had a lot of fun with those, the testosterone was certainly flowing strong :-) If it hadn’t cost $25 per ride of about 10 minutes or so, we’d have gone a second time for sure. But once was probably good, since several muscles got sore from use even that first time!
I actually got to bed by 1am last night Vegas time, and got up at 8:30 this morning. 7.5 hours…feels good, the last two nights I got just over half that :-)
Gotta go get ready for the day! The show is so huge it’s amazing. Many football fields in size, in each of several buildings!
Well, short post to mention that day two in Vegas, the first day of the NAB convention, is over. I’m going to bed. New photos are uploading, most aren’t public yet I need to go through them. So I won’t link to them now, I’ll give you a link later, maybe tomorrow night, maybe later…depends on when I have time! I only have web access at night, even though I have email during the day (wireless at the convention is $25/day! Hotel is $10/day. Which would you go with?).
We arrived in Las Vegas around 9pm Vegas time, or 11pm home time. Took around an hour to walk terminal, get luggage, rent car…then we drove to the Strip where we’re staying at one of the hotel/casinos (I might post which one after we get back). Quite an amazing drive for three guys who’ve never been to Vegas! So many lights and so much money spent on looks!
We took a walk after checking in to the hotel, didn’t get too many pictures as I forgot to grab my camera on the way out the door at first, but got a few. Oh well, more later. You can “see the pictures here from Las Vegas Day 1”:http://www.flickr.com/photos/existdifferently/sets/241080/.
Walking down the strip, we walked past so many pimps passing out handbills I couldn’t keep count; they hold them out with one hand and try to offer them to you, and do a little flicking motion and makes noise against the paper as an extra attention-getter. Plus, the sidewalk was littered with handbills the size of playing cards, often well within 10 feet of each other (or less) they were so dense in certain areas. Like walking on nearly-naked confetti (but without looking at them closely you can’t make out anything other than they weren’t fully naked, they are playing-card sized after all, and many on the sidewalk were upside-down with just words (phone/advertisement/coupon/whatever) showing, too. Pretty sad. Fortunately I have less than zero desire for such a shallow relationship, not to mention the sin or cost issues involved, being on a church trip…numerous things would keep me from pursuing the adverts even if I were so inclined, which like I mentioned I’m not. What a wasted life for most of those girls and their pimps though.
We haven’t solified things, but we may see “Blue Man Group”:http://www.blueman.com/ at Luxor on Tuesday night! And “Star Trek: The Experience”:http://www.startrekexp.com at the Hilton is on the possible list as well…right down the street!
Well, this afternoon (Sunday the 17th) I’m off to Las Vegas! A pastor from my church (the media pastor), the Technical Director, and me are all going to “NAB2005”:http://www.nabshow.com/ (the National Association of Broadcasters trade show/conference). It’s going to be fun, and we’ll hopefully pick up some good pointers for what we want to do in the future with our video/media. The show is Monday through Wednesday, and we’re coming back on the red-eye Wednesday night and should be back in town Thursday morning (fortunately I have Thursday off). My girlfriend Ruth is taking a couple of hours off work early on Thursday so I can see her soon when I get back (and finish sleeping Thursday morning, depending on how good the overnight flight goes), she’s so awesome :-)
Depending on what kind of internet access we have in Vegas, I may be posting some pics online while I’m there or perhaps when I get back, time permitting. I may shoot a few good ones over to this blog, but you could watch my “Flickr photostream”:http://www.flickr.com/photos/existdifferently/ directly for any new ones coming down the pike!
Also, in case anyone’s interested, Fuji has a nice $50 rebate this month on their “Finepix S5100”:http://www.imaging-resource.com/PRODS/S5100/S51A.HTM SLR-like digital camera! It’s 4 megapixels with a 10x optical zoom, among lots of other good features, which you can see by reading the review the name is linked to. Best price I’ve seen (it’s where I ordered mine) before the rebate is from “ButterflyPhoto”:http://www.butterflyphoto.com/ and you can “see the S5100 item listing here”:http://www.butterflyphoto.com/shop/product.aspx?sku=FUJIS5100. Just $249.95 before the rebate, or $199.99 (yes, that’s less than $200!) after the rebate! This camera was at least $275 before shipping at the cheapest location I’ve ever found for it, back a couple of months ago when I bought my “Finpix E550”:http://www.imaging-resource.com/PRODS/E550/E55A.HTM (buy it now for “$247 at ButterflyPhoto”:http://www.butterflyphoto.com/shop/product.aspx?sku=FUJIE550 which is over $60 less than I paid for it!) which is another awesome camera but more along the point-and-shoot lines (but is VERY nice for that type of shooting, and I’ve taken over 2,000 pictures with it since I got it around two months ago!). Anyway, I ordered this last (Friday) night and it should get here either next week around when I get home, or at the latest the beginning of the next week. I already have a second 512MB xD picture card to use in it…best price on those is “eCost.com”:http://www.ecost.com/ecost/ecsplash/shop/detail~dpno~269806.asp as far as I’ve found (free shipping, small handling fee, $10 for overnight shipping). The xD picture cards are a bit more expensive than traditional flash storage cards but the data transfer rate is much higher unless you buy a high-speed card of another type, which would likely be priced the same. But all xD cards are the same high speed, no need to double-check :-)
Went to a city park this past Saturday and took some good pictures out on the hiking trails. This one in particular was of a really nice area covered with yellow flowers among the trees, right next to the trail!
The rest of the “park set”:http://www.flickr.com/photos/existdifferently/sets/230616/ can be found on “Flickr”:http://www.flickr.com/photos/existdifferently/.
One of over 500 pictures total taken at the White River Gardens Butterfly Exibit on April 2nd, 2005. I just have a few online right now but they’re all nice and captioned/commented. This is one of the better butterfly pics I’ve got online so far. The better flowers and butterfly shots are also together both in a set available on my Flickr homepage, and also a Group for the Gardens with just the best, most interesting nature-related photos.
This isn’t my coolest picture by any means, but it did kind’ve strike me as nice when I ran across it when looking through my Flickr stuff. So you get to see it here. I’ll probably start posting more Flickr stuff here, since I can post to my blog right from within the Flickr site from any image. I can only include that image specifically, but I can compose my post and everything and wham, bam, thank you ma’am…posted! Now to weed out my more creative pics over the next few weeks or so, to keep my blog up and running :-)
This picture is one of my favs from the trip I took with my small group to a cabin an hour away from the city in February. Lots good nature pictures from the trip, some of which I’ve made public on Flickr, but this has to be right up near the top of my favorites! It would probably look even better given some tweaking in an editing program.
Talking is cool. Both online and in person. For me, when I get enough talking one-on-one, apparently I can’t come up with anything worthwhile to post to the general public here (and by “general public” I mean, the two or three people that read this regularly and anyone else that stumbles through from Google or something :-)
Not that that’s a bad thing. Unless you want to read more stuff here. But hey, it’s my blog, so you’ll just have to live. I do respond to comments occasionally, especially from commenters that aren’t, um, regulars :-) Or I would, if there were more than three such comments on the whole site. And one of those is from someone I know in person.
Of course, if I posted more interesting stuff here that was actually worth commenting on, I suppose I might then expect more comments. Catch-22 really. Or maybe the most important things I have to say right now aren’t meant for you to hear. Or you. Or you. Safe bet: if you don’t know if it’s you or not, it’s not you :-) On the other hand, if you do know what I’m talking about, feel free to ignore what I’m talking about, it doesn’t apply to you :-)
Do I get a prize? You know, for least content in three paragraphs? I should at least get runner-up for this one :-) What do you know, I did want to talk. Just not about anything you’re probably interested in, here at least :-) If you’re feeling left out, give it time (sure for this post to sink in or something (like it ever will…ha! Like the blonde that died in the shower when the shampoo bottle said “lather, rinse, repeat” ;-), but what I mean is come back later and perhaps eventually I’ll be able to post something more interesting in such a public forum :-)
Um…”Mozilla Firefox 1.0.2″:http://www.getfirefox.com/ is out. It’s cool. Get it. Um…[looks at multitude of tabs open for something interesting to post]…I found a site called “LinkedIn”:https://www.linkedin.com/ the other day that I hadn’t seen before. Interesting stuff, but I haven’t signed up yet. Still, the tab remains open since I’m curious about it :-)
Also, “Magix music products”:http://site.magix.net/index.php?id=471&no_cache=1 are good stuff…try the demos sometime. Music Studio 2005 is really good and at less than $100 is very powerful, the main limitation I run into is not being able to edit the audio while recording at the same time, which you can do in their premiere “Samplitude”:http://site.magix.net/index.php?id=15648&type=2 product (although it’s $1,000 more expensive :-)
If you have an extra $79 laying around (and who doesn’t?), “Amazon Prime”:http://www.amazon.com/gp/subs/primeclub/signup/main.html/002-2086300-3510456 is a nice program to get into if you like Amazon.com and want to get fast, free shipping (or faster, cheaper shipping). Details are right there on the site, I think you can read it without me :-) Free two-day shipping on over 1 million items, overnight for $3.99, for a year. Yep, I told you anyway! Get over it!
Ran into an interesting site while searching for something (I don’t remember what, a how-to on something) the other day. It’s a computer help site called “Bleeping Computer”:http://www.bleepingcomputer.com/. I get a kick out of the name and wish I’d gotten to that domain…like I need more than the 30+ I have :-)
If you’re looking to buy something computer related, first check out “eCost”:http://www.ecost.com/ because they have a lot of good deals. LCDs and camera memory cards are some of their best and most often discounted items. But they have lots of stuff. Also, for general, daily updated deals (lots of Dell deals that link directly to Dell, sometimes with coupon codes, but plenty of non-Dell, and some non-computer related, like “Overstock.com”:http://www.overstock.com selling down comforters and bedsheets really cheap) are awesome over at “GotApex”:http://www.gotapex.com/. I watch that site several days out of the week to spot good stuff. Not that I buy that often, or I’d be much poorer than I am (although they’re one of the reasons I’m as poor as I am already :-)
For example, GotApex is listing right now that Amazon.com has a “Canon PowerShot SD110 Digital Elph 3 megapixel 2X zoom”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B0001G6U9I/ref%3Dnosim/gotapex/002-2086300-3510456 camera for just $159! If I had the spare cash I’d jump on it, the Elphs are awesome because they’re so darn tiny while still be high quality. And usually high priced. But I don’t :-)
And, my last item for this post is “my Flickr page”:http://www.flickr.com/photos/existdifferently/ which, if you’re not on my friends or family list, still has a lot of pictures that I spent all night last Friday night (until 8am Saturday morning) tagging with metadata and making public. I have over 3,200 images uploaded to Flickr, and am nowhere near getting them all sorted (probably never will be) but I like the ones I have available now :-)
Goodnight!
Update: I do find it somewhat ironic how long this post ended up being, and how much info I included, given the title. So much for intent! :-) But aren’t you glad I got around to some actually useful information after all that stuff at the top?
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