Double Journey

Not to make light of Michael Jackson’s death but one positive thing did come from his passing.  Today was by far the lightest traffic day I have ever encountered on my way to work.  Amazingly, it really should have been the exact opposite.  I work about five blocks from the Staples Center, the site of today’s Michael Jackson memorial.  There were numerous announcements of street closures due to the event.  They were not even going to let people with in a few blocks of Staples Center just to keep the crowds under control.   Given all this, I was fearful of what my commute would be like today.

But much to my surprise the freeways were completely empty.  I’m not kidding, it looked like a Saturday afternoon in downtown L.A.  Heck it looked better than a Saturday and I should know considering how many Saturdays I’ve worked lately.  Ironically, those who took the train in told me that the trains were pretty crowded in the morning.  The only think I can guess is that everyone was so afraid of how bad traffic would be, nobody decided to drive in.  That made it very easy for those of us who decided to drive in (or who had no choice).

I very much doubt that all those people could take the day off or simply work from home.  So what it really tells me is that L.A. traffic would not be nearly as bad if they really could just find a way to promote public transportation.

Seriously, what the hell is wrong with Imax?

When you think Imax, what do you think of?  You think of a big gigantic screen.  A screen so big that there is nothing else in your field of vision.  Well this weekend I went to go see Star Trek.  Which by the way was a pretty good movie, even for someone who is a closet trekie like myself.   A couple of my friends wanted to see Star Trek in the Imax experience.  Why not, it seems to be the perfect movie to go watch it in.  Plenty of action and lots of special effects. 

Well we went to the “Imax” in Burbank.  Notice the quotes because this was no Imax.  The screen may have been slightly larger.  Supposedly the picture was all digital and therefore cleaner and the sound was supposedly better.  But come on.  The screen was maybe 10% bigger than a normal screen and nowhere near the monster screens I’ve seen before.  To make matters worse, I paid a 30% premium on my ticket to go see this film.  Movie tickets are already way too expensive.  Add 30% on top of that and now you better have one hell of an experience. 

But the question is, why on earth would Imax do this to their brand.  Up until now, I thought Imax stood for something.  It stood for an experience you could not get anywhere else.  To sell out their brand like this to make a few bucks makes no sense.  It is like Coke making Coke Clear but even worse since Imax is not distinguishing these small screens from their much larger brothers.  At least with Coke, you knew you were getting something different.  With this I had no idea that the experience would be underwhelming.  In fact, the experience has left a bad enough taste in my mouth I’m pretty sure I will never go to another Imax film again.  All of that to just scam me out of $5. 

Have you been duped by Imax?  Do you think they are doing themselves a disservice by weakening their brand?

If you haven’t watched Susan Boyle sing in the British show Britain’s got Talent, go watch it.  I think my favorite part of the whole video is the look on Simon’s face as he realizes what an amazing talent is coming out of this most surprising of packages.   I love being shocked at things, and this video is truly shocking.

Just goes to show you, not everything is as it seems on the surface.  Just look at this market.  Market will probably run up tomorrow.  It looks like a strong market.  Just don’t be fooled.

This past weekend was my birthday. I turned 31. Being who I am, we did not do too much. I prefer to stay at home which makes it pretty easy to not spend too much money.  We got up in the morning and had homemade waffles.  Shortly after that I got to open up my birthday gift.  My fiancee got me a new tripod, the Manfrotto 190XDB, to go along with my camera.

We decided to go to the local arboretum to spend the day.  It was a beautiful California day.  It was actually to the point where I was sweating part way through.  It must have been in the 80’s.  I got several good shots with my camera (no shots with the tripod unfortunately) and was ready to call it a day by 2:00 p.m.  I was dead tired, the sun will do that to you, so i was ready to go home and just plop on the couch.  I watched the NCAA tournament and waited to go to dinner at some mysterious location.

Well the location ended up being the Arroyo Chop House.  It is a high-end steak house, similar to Ruth Chris but probably better.  We had been there once before several years ago but I honestly did not remember too much about it.  This time what stood out was the excellent service they provided.  They knew ahead of time that it was my birthday. So they reserved a spot right next to the fireplace.  They even left a card on the table wishing me a happy birthday.  I thought that was a very nice touch.

I ordered what else, a steak.  She ordered a lobster tail.  The food was excellent, better than you can get at other places like Ruth Chris.  All told, the meal, with two glasses of wine, cost us $150.   Was it worth it?  It is hard to say.  Is it ever OK to spend $150 on one meal?  It is not something we do very often but it is sometimes nice to splurge.  We can afford it easily, so it is not like we have to stretch to make this work.   We probably only eat out like this two or three times a year, my birthday, her birthday, and on our anniversary.

So should we do this? I tend to think it can actually be important to splurge every once in awhile.  You cannot be frugal all the time and it is important to once in awhile enjoy the fruits of your labor.

What do you think? Are extravagances like this justified?

As I write this, I am extremely sore from a workout I did last night.  This is because I have not hit the gym in the last two weeks.

As I get older, I find more and more excuses to not work out.  Last week, it was because my Fiancee was sick and I stayed at home to take care of her.  The week before that, I was extremely busy at work trying to work through all the layoff issues.  The week before that, I was busy at work with reviews.  The funny thing is, I do not think I am any busier than I was a few years ago, I just think I got better at making excuses. I do not even play basketball anymore, and it used to be the case that absolutely nothing got in the way between me and some court time.

It really is too bad.  I think staying in shape is an important thing and something that is highly underrated.  When you exercise you look better, you feel better, you think better, and you are treated better.  Yet when things start backing up, and life becomes busy, it is one of the first things to go even though it should really be the last.  I never thought I would give up exercise.  I enjoyed it so much growing up and I cannot believe I am now having to force myself to go do something I used to enjoy so much.

I have decided to carve out some time somewhere to work out.  Most likely it will have to be during lunch.  I am too lazy to get up early in the morning and I am usually wiped out after work.  The only time that will work is sometime in the middle of the day, and that means I am working out at lunch.

I sometimes cannot believe how bad some companies are.  I had a perfect example of this happened this weekend when my cable internet was down for the entire weekend.

I was going to actually have several posts written this weekend so that I could have a regular posting schedule this week.  The week at work is going to be hectic as I have to finish off my reviews and my company is sponsoring a big trade show.  There just will not be much time to blog this week.  You add to it the fact that my fiancee was sick all weekend, meaning I never really left the house, and you can see how frustrated I became at the fact that Charter Communications does not have its act together enough to prevent a weekend long outage.

This is actually not the first long outage I’ve experienced with Charter.  Over the last year we have had a couple of day long outages.  I find that completely unacceptable.  I am part of an internet company.  I am now responsible for all the technology that gets delivered on that platform.  We do not have outages.  In the last several years, you can probably count on one hand the number of outages we have had that have lasted longer than 30 minutes.  Since I’ve been at the company in the last year, we haven’t had any that lasted longer than that.  You can be certain that someone would get fired if an outage lasted more than a day.  I could not even imagine an outage that lasted two days as we have backup plans for our backup plans.

Yet somehow, Charter Communications had a city wide outage that lasted two days.  What the hell is that?  Worse, when I called about it, they gave me vague excuses and no time line when I might expect service back.  Just great.  Lucky for me, I get an internet connection on my computer by hooking up my phone but I don’t like doing lots of personal stuff on that device since my work pays for it.  But seriously, what type of clown operation are these Charter guys running?  How ridiculous is it that they have a near monopoly on high speed internet service in the area.  If there ever was a reason consumers need competition and choice, this level of service clearly demonstrates it.

So bad, my cat has moved into a paper bag. I’m actually not too sure why he likes to do this, but he seems to like to get himself into small tight spaces like paper bags or boxes.  It’s odd.

Just a quick post tonight.  Lots of things going on at work, some of which I will blog about later, but don’t have the energy to do it tonight.  One thing, the market rallied on almost no news.  I was about to go long, since I had closed my short position yesterday as I mentioned in my last post, but all the turmoil at work once again got in my way of making any trades.

No way to play the market where it is right now.  I will just wait and hope we rally a bit more before I go short again.  Another 5% up from here, or the S&P 500 being at about 950, and I will look to get short again.  Until then, I’m probably out and won’t make any trades.

I’ve decided to buy myself a digital SLR camera. I, like always, did a lot of research on what to buy, and I ended up deciding to buy the Canon Rebel XSi. I’ve been interested in photography for quite a while. I owned a Canon Elan 7E and was pretty happy with it so I decided to stick with the Canon line.  It has the additional benefit that I can use most of my old lenses on the new camera, so I should save some money since I won’t be buying all new gear.

This is actually a little unusual for me.  When I buy electronics, I almost never buy the entry level.  I’m a firm believer that you should basically buy the upper middle of a product line.  You should not buy the best because usually the price premium is too great to justify the benefit you get out of the extra features.  You usually should not buy the entry level either because the manufacturer often saves the better, more useful features for the step up models.  The upper middle of a product line tends to be where the sweet spot is in terms of price and performance, so it is what I generally recommend people do.

Now while I could have afforded to buy the step up model, either the EOS 40D or the EOS 50D, I decided that this time the entry level model just made more sense to me. The step up features did not seem to mean too much to me.  The step up models have better construction, higher ISO settings, and a few more controls to tweak.  None of these are a show stopper for me, and not worth the price gap of over $300, or over a 50% premium.  The resolution of the XSi is actually better than the 40D and slightly under the 50D but I don’t expect this to make much difference.  Photography at high levels depends much more on your lenses than it does on the camera body, so for me I think it is all a wash.  So this time, I decided to save the cash and hopefully use the price difference to buy a nice lens or two.

I also decided to just save some money on this purchase.  It is not as if I’m worried about my finances, far from it, but it cannot hurt right now to be a little cautious just in case.  In fact, I’m saving money mostly because there is a host of other things I want to buy and I did not want to go overboard buying too much photography equipment; especially when you consider the fact that I’ve taken a few years off from this hobby and I’m not so sure how much energy I’m going to put back into it.

So if anyone has any experience with this camera, or any of the other ones I’ve mentioned, let me know what you think.  I’ll be buying it off Amazon soon, much like I will be for most of my purchases going forward, to get around some of the things going on in California.  More on that later …

Like any good obsession, I’m watching very closely where my TV currently is. Unfortunately for me, my TV started all the way on the other side of the country in Harrisburg, PA. It is slowly (very slowly) making its way across the country to me. It currently resides in Columbus, Ohio, where it is resting before continuing its journey westward to L.A.

TV is “estimated to arrive” on June 11th, which gives it another week to make the rest of the journey. This is most definitely one of the reasons to buy your TV in a brick and mortar star, instant gratification. I’ve already paid for the TV, I would like to be enjoying it right about now, but I wait. Considering I got it for almost $1000 off MSRP, I suppose its worth the week+ wait, but it isn’t easy.

I decided to pull the trigger on the Panasonic 50PZ800u and have discovered one of the better under-publicized features of Amazon, their 30 day price guarantee. One of the anxieties of buying any big ticket electronic is that prices are always dropping and you just know it is going to drop the minute after you make your purchase. There wasn’t a more perfect example of this than this. More on that in a minute.

On Friday, Amazon showed that it had my TV in stock. Funny enough, they delayed the “In Stock” date yet again the day after my original post about Amazon teasing me. So I had to wait another day before I felt comfortable ordering it. I got in on Friday morning to see that they were showing the item in stock, so I decided to go through with the purchase and just order it. I wanted to get the TV as soon as possible since the NBA finals will be starting on Thursday, and the Lakers are in it. It is going to be a classic match up between Los Angeles and Boston so I wanted to catch as much of it as I could on the new TV.

I ordered the TV at about 10:00 a.m. PST. The price of the TV when I ordered it was $2368.86. I felt fairly comfortable with the price and truth be told I would have been happy to pay that amount. But wouldn’t you know it. I obsessively checked the status of my order at noon and noticed that the price had dropped more than $50 to $2313.96. I could only laugh as I found the whole thing pretty amusing. You expect the price to drop sometime after you buy it, and that’s just life. There is no point in always holding out for a lower price because you will never get what you want. But dropping by $50 just two hours after you have bought it? Now that’s just irony.

Now I have read that Amazon has some pretty sophisticated albeit strange pricing algorithms. It could very well be that my purchasing of the TV actually caused the price of the item to go down. As the margins on these TVs are pretty good, and I’m sure they don’t sell them in as much quantity as say a DVD, it is very likely that my actions had an affect on the price, and therefore the price dropped. Of course this would fly in the face of traditional supply-and-demand principles, but who am I to tell them not to give consumers a better deal?

However, Amazon has a 30 day price guarantee that is good until 30 days after the item is shipped (my item hasn’t even shipped yet so I think I’m getting an even longer window). All you have to do is go to the customer service screen which should list all your recent orders. You should be able to click on a button to e-mail customer service. If you e-mail them with the price that you saw listed on Amazon, they will refund you the difference with a credit to your credit card.

But it gets better. You can do this as often as you like in your 30 day window. Quite literally, another 3 hours later, the price dropped yet again to $2286.86, a total of $82 less than my original purchase price. I e-mailed them again to get the new price difference and yet again they credited me the money.

Wait, it still gets better. There is absolutely no hassle about it. It really couldn’t be any easier or faster. Each time I got a pretty standard response saying they looked at it, and they agreed they had it at a lower price, and they would credit my credit card the amount. And they did this all within a few hours after my inquiry (even though today is a Saturday).

So far, so good. Now all I need is for the TV to show up …