Black Friday 2005: Revisited

I came across an interesting editorial piece on Engadget describing some ways that Black Friday might be made a little easier on the shopper for a particular store. The article is in the form of a letter from a Black Friday retailer to the author, a paying customer.

Click here. to see the article or look at the full body below.

If you have any good ideas how you think Black Friday could be better, feel free to post them.

Continue reading

Black Friday 2005

Things I learned from Black Friday this year at Best Buy.

  • If other people know you are going to stand in line, they will invariably ask you to pick something up for them too.
  • If doors open at 5am and you get in line at 1:40am, you will still not be close enough to the door to qualify for the really good deals everyone wants.
  • No matter how many layers of clothes you wear, you will still lose feeling in your feet.
  • While waiting in line, dozens of asians will cut you in line and when confronted will pretend not to understand english.
  • People become irrationally furious and violent when said asians cut in line at 4:30 in the morning.
  • The cops can’t do much when everyone ignores them.
  • When the doors open, unless you are close to the front of the line you will most likely not get in for another half hour at the very least. (we were close to the front.)
  • Once you are in, you cannot stop moving or you will be trampled.
  • The section of the store that 90% of the crowds want to go to will be roped off because they would be shoplifted into bankruptcy.
  • The one heavily discounted item that you came for will be blocked off by the line waiting to enter said section of store.
  • People become just as irrationally furious and violent in the store as they were outside the store if they feel you are cutting them in line. Even if you are just getting an item off a shelf they are blocking.
  • Once you finally make it to said item, you will watch someone pick up the last one, with no hope of the store having any more.
  • If you ask 5 different people where a sale item is, you will get 5 different responses and none of them will actually be right.
  • and finally, after you are outside the store and walking to your car with your purchased items, you will come to the realization that you could have gone in to the store at 11am and bought all the same items at all the same prices with a lot more sleep and a lot less aggravation.

Maybe next year.

Link Dump 2005.11.17

This is your link dump for November 17, 2005.

Home Carbonation

Meditation apparently helps you perform better and even alters the structure of your brain.
via lifehacker.com

How to get started meditating.
via lifehacker.com

How to handle an overbearing mom.
via lifehacker.com

The coolest DDR Video I have seen yet.
via digg.com

MangaPods
Podcasts of Manga.
via digg.com

AIMBots.
I signed into AIM yesterday and it automatically added these bots without my permission. Go here to find more out about them.
via digg.com

More on the AIM bots.

Paris Hilton attacked by own monkey.
via digg.com

Defrag your iPod (or rather mp3 player!)
via lifehacker.com

‘Metal hand sign’ (aka the ‘woooo’ sign) abuse.
via WhilWeatonDotNet

XBox 360 pr0n.

More Xbox 360 pr0n.
The XBox 360 dissected. Way cool.

The OLPC $100 Laptop revealed.
Actually looks really cool. Except the vomit-like color.

‘Type Manager’ – A new way to manage your files
This is more so I remember to go back and read this article. Looked interesting from the glimpse I got, though probably not to most people. I’m boring like that.

Thats all for today.
I’ll have a new flash game link to share tomorrow.

Massive Gallery Updates

I have been slaving away at the computer for the weekend resizing, rotating and uploading massive numbers of images for your viewing pleasure. While the updates are not complete just yet, they are substantial. A few people still owe me pictures, but I decided not to wait any longer.

Ronnie’s Last Day at NES
Halloween 2005 Pub Crawl
Halloween 2005 Party in Davis Square
Vegas 2005
Ronnie Goes to Las Vegas …Again

[Edit – Crazy: Updated Gallery plugin. Links fixed accordingly. 2006.06.03]

Moleskine

I went to Barnes & Noble the other day before my trip to Vegas and finally got around to joining the discount club for a year. Considering how much I’m in there buying stuff to read, I should be able to make back that investment easily. While I was in there I poked around the journal and sketchbook section and found some Moleskine notepads. (pronounced mole-eh-skeenay)

For those not in the know, its a just a small notepad with a leather like cover, cloth bookmark stitched to the binding, an attached fabric elastic of some sort that keeps the book closed and a small pocket on the inside of the back cover. Its a nice little notebook that has actually gained a lot of popularity.

In the slow battle against becoming my dad, I had another defeat and picked up two of these little books. One with blank pages to sketch in and one with lined pages to keep on me to jot notes to myself for later on. My dad carries around a cheap little spiral bound notebook that probably measures 2 x 3 inches that you can find in any drug store. He has an awful time remembering stuff so he writes everything down in that little book and never looks at it again.

I have a lot of ideas for projects I’d like to do on the side and I never remember it all by the end of the day, so we’ll try the paternal approach.

Three people have already asked me if it was my black book of phone numbers of girls I know…maybe this will work out after all…

Margins

Looking back on my youth, I am reminded of a simpler time. The man was still keeping me down, but found simpler ways to nurture my early neurotic tendencies.

Throughout my schooling, teachers always reminded us to think outside the box. Be unconventional. Yet in elementary school, structure was forced upon us from the getgo. We were introduced to this foreign concept called ‘margins‘. To this day, I can only guess the purpose of these so-called ‘margins‘.

On every assignment we were forced to draw these lines a specific length from the edge of every sheet of paper. With each torturous page, two new lines had to be measured out and drawn. As a lefty, it was quite common that I smeared these lines while trying to write my assignment. Heaven forbid that I should need to erase something on these low quality pieces of lined yellow paper. I take that pencil, invert, put the eraser to the paper and immediately thereafter the paper disintegrated and you ended up erasing the notes you wrote to yourself on the surface of your desk. If any words crossed these ‘margins‘, 5 points were deducted for each offense.

Way, to teach me to think outside the box, Teach. All you showed me how to do was construct the walls for my own box of orthodoxy! No, nothing traumatizing about that at all.

Hey school people, if you pay 5 cents more for a ream of lined paper, the margins are already on there.