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A Black Friday of moderate success (holiday weekend pt 1)

Costco trip count for November: 17

I actually didn't mean to go to Costco over the Thanksgiving weekend, yet there I was on Saturday (and it really wasn't as busy as I thought it would be). Picked up some CDRs for half price, pants on sale, and they were still giving away copies of the Costco Cookbook.

Today there wasn't much new and interesting...the 360 bundle with the extra controller, play-and-charge kit, and a number of Live Arcade games on disc was marked down $25, to $450. Apparently Clerks II came out today as well, I had no idea. :-P The idea of seeing a Clerks movie in color just seems a bit strange, for some reason. I'm glad to see they finally have a decent (though not huge) selection of 360 games to buy, maybe 12-15 or so. Compared to the zero they had for a few months there, I suppose it's an improvement.

Thursday night, completely satiated by two Thanksgiving dinners, I headed out to Best Buy around midnight to camp out for Black Friday deals with a few of my friends. Packing the "couch" and two thermoses holding about 10 cups of coffee, I set up my spot and waited. And waited. Then it got kind of cold, and I waited a bit more.

Around 3am, cars started rolling into the parking lot regularly. The traffic was probably comparable to a normal saturday afternoon, except it was 3am. :-P Around 4am employees started handing out tickets for the big items, and I got one in particular I was looking for. One of my friends was hoping for a tv, but didn't even come close. Unfortunately, getting there at midnight meant there were a couple hundred people in line in front of us. Having finished all of my coffee (without a restroom in sight), the store finally opened at 5 and we all piled our way in. I found just about everything I was looking for, so in that respect it was somewhat successful. Got in line about 5:45, got to the checkout counter around 7:45. Ouch. The guys behind us in line got to the store at 3am, so obviously we didn't gain a whole lot by getting there 3 hours earlier.

There were lots of good intentions going around, people wanting to hit up the mall or other stores after Best Buy, but those faded away as we exited the store and were greeted with sunshine, exhaustion, and extreme hunger (we didn't bring any snacks, way to think ahead). Off to Amados for some breakfast burritos, then I came home and slept until about 4pm.

Lessons learned:
* Just go at 3am with everyone else, and one person in the group gets in line to check out while everyone else shops.
* Bring food.
* Don't drink all of your coffee at once.
* It's not only darkest before the dawn, it's also the coldest, so dress accordingly (I already knew this, but was still cold.

Broken Integra (holiday weekend pt 2)

A short car failure story. Wednesday afternoon the screw holding in my distributor rotor thought it had enough, and decided to remove itself from the system. The rotor thought this was fantastic, and celebrated by tearing up the distributor cap while mauling itself in the process. Glorious. Get my new cap and rotor on Friday, still doesn't work. New complete distributor is on its way from "distributor king" on ebay. Meanwhile I'm driving my parent's 740 wagon, in all of its boxy turbo wagon goodness. At the very least, the car fits me well. Lots of steering wheel/leg clearance, I have at least a couple inches of headroom, and the headrests are sized well for someone my size. It even fits in the garage!

This made Sunday's autocross interesting, as now we had no car to drive. Fortunately, Brad was nice enough to let us co-drive his godaddy.com Miata, complete with slick orange and green stripes. Teresa and I were both pretty pleased with our results, her with one of her best pax scores since the GS Neon, and I scored higher than I have in a good number of events now. Driving the right car for the class has its benefits I suppose. ;-)

Hey, that's new

Costco trip count for November: 15

Browsing the store today, I noticed something I hadn't seen before - an endcap full of Kirkland "Rabbit" corkscrews. Usually I believe these go for about $30-40 with plastic handles, and $50 to over $100 for metal handles. The fact that this one is metal and only $20 in-store really surprised me.

Also of note, Costco is almost overflowing with pies. They're big and relatively cheap, and for being store-made, I think the pecan pie is pretty good. I believe they have pumpkin for $6, caramel apple for $8, and pecan for $10. Tomorrow they'll probably put them in racks at the front of the store for the Thanksgiving rush. If I didn't have T-day plans, I'd probably just sit down with a pie for dinner, washing it down with a big glass of eggnog to usher in the Christmas season. Nog-tastic.:-D

Finally, Tostitos "hint of lime" chips are great. Though they should just be called "lime chips" or something, because there's way more than a hint of limey goodness on them. To quote this review:

If they wanted to, Tostitos could take the lime powder and sell it in dime bags to junkies, Corona drinkers, and Rush Limbaugh.

Yes, they're that good. My purchase was made that much better by the fact that there was a "buy two bags of chips, get a jar of dip free" promotion going on.

Goodbye Mr. Pibb

Costco trip count for November: 12

After purchasing my standard hot dog & soda combo at the food court today, I sauntered over to the soda machines, and I may have actually gasped - Mr. Pibb was nowhere to be found, replaced by Hi-C lemonade. A sad day indeed. :-(

Other Costco-related items of note:
* One of the samples today was the alaskan king crab corn chowder, which was good enough to make me want to buy some. Unfortunately the chopped garlic sample wasn't ready yet, but it smelled great.
* No KS vodka to be found, despite many unsold bottles of other vodkas stacked up around its former position.
* Fresh shipments of Heineken and Fat Tire showed up recently.
* Costco.com is going to start selling PS3s tomorrow (11/17) at 9am AZ time. I'm guessing they'll sell out pretty quickly. :-P Sounds like the stores won't have any, which doesn't surprise me. At the very least, it'll be nice to finally see what's in their bundle. I've read that for the Wii, they'll sell it in a two-game bundle for $339 (one of which is Zelda), so we'll see how true that is in a few days.

This thread rekindled my interest in beer brewing, so I may have to make a go at that in upcoming months (though obviously on a smaller scale). There are several brewing shops in town and a number of decent online stores that sell everything you need, so there's no shortage of available supplies. The Brewer Starting Kit from midwestsupplies.com seems like a good place to start, though the upgrade to Intermediate with the "better bottles" seems like it might be worthwhile as well.

And it's gone

Costco trip count for November: 11

It seems that the Tempe warehouse sold out of Kirkland vodka on Sunday, and the price sign was taken down on Monday. :-( Hopefully it will be back soon.

Not much else new there, other than some new additions to the dvd aisle (which also happen to go on my wish list). The Family Guy Season 4 set came on on Tuesday, so that was there. Volume 4 of the Looney Toons Golden Collection was also released on Tuesday, and they happened to have the other three volumes available as well. The ones I don't care about so much, some of the really big box sets have come back - the complete sets of Friends, West Wing, and Six Feet Under (complete with fake grass box top) are nearly $200 iirc. Related news, Simpsons Season 9 is due out on 12/19. :-D

Costco's Black Friday coupon book is in the store now, but there's not a whole lot on there that seems interesting. Related, bfads.net has ads for many of the "good" stores already. They had to take down Best Buy's ad, but some items of significance (to me anyway) were a number of 360 games for cheap. The Outfit was $10, maybe 5 or 6 others that I don't think are on the Platinum Hits list are $20. I know Table Tennis was on there, but I don't remember what else. :-P

Depleted resources

Costco trip count for November: 7

On my trip to Costco last night, I noticed the incredibly low stock on Kirkland vodka. It has had the "Star of Discontinuation" for several weeks now, though I refused to believe it. It's not like it was selling at a slow pace or anything, and it just came out. The only thing I could think of is that perhaps they can't get it restocked quickly enough, and it will be out of stock for some time. That's my hope anyway. :-(

Playing Guitar Hero 2 has been fantastic. The widescreen and progressive scan options are quite welcome, though I wish progressive scan wouldn't have to be turned on whenever the game is started. There's a "recalibration" option that could have been useful if I had done it right from the start, but I played about 6 hours the first night without calibration, and once I tried calibrating it I could barely play at all. So back to zero for me there.

I've played through all of the songs on Medium difficulty with 5 stars, and all but the last 3 songs on Hard. Regarding the track list in this game, I'm not quite sure how I feel about it yet. While there are plenty of great bands, and lots of good songs, there haven't been many yet that made me think "yeah, I really enjoyed playing that one." Perhaps that'll come when I get better at them on Hard, rather than fumbling my way through. Compared to the original, it seems that there are plenty of longer songs, and the Hard difficulty in GH2 is more difficult than Hard in GH1.

I've been running occasionally for the last few weeks, and actually not dying. Last night I finally made it over 3 miles without stopping, so I'm always happy to see improvement.

XMBC screenshots

As promised...the only one I resized is the last one, which was captured at 1920x1080 for some reason. :-P

XBMC

Costco trip count for November: 6

Actually went to Costco three more times over the weekend. Saturday we went to the Chandler store to look for some glasses that weren't at the Tempe store, almost immediately followed by a trip to the Tempe store. The odd thing (that I didn't know) was that both stores had the exact same samples. So I learned something new. :-P Then yesterday was just a trip for food. I noticed that the 1-gallon containers of eggnog are now in stock, awaiting their deployment to my refrigerator.

I installed Xbox Media Center (XBMC) on my old Xbox this weekend, and it seems pretty cool. Other than the part about hot-swapping IDE hard drives that kind of weirded me out, it went well for the most part. I had some problems unlocking the xbox hard drive at first, but eventually that worked. Then another time I forgot to plug the power cable to the hard drive back in, so that explained one of the errors I was getting. ;-) After that though, it was great. I could FTP into the box just fine, load up all of the software, get some emulators on there, stream video/music, everything. Streaming video is a lot easier than it is on the 360, plus you have lots of options for the video...it can be deinterlaced, contrast/brightness can be adjusted, lots of things. How much use will I actually have for it? Who knows.

I took some screenshots, but forgot to download them from the xbox. Lame.

Four more days

...until Guitar Hero 2 is released.

Costco trip count for November: 3

I went to Costco twice yesterday and once today (so far). Yesterday they had one of my favorite samples, the illustrious Hershey's Chocolate-covered Pretzels. I would eat this as breakfast cereal in a bowl of milk if I could. The Halloween section had been replaced with Christmas trees since Tuesday, no post-Halloween candy sales here! :-P

Whenever I go to Costco with Evan, he has to check out their high-dollar watches. He has a thing for watches. But the watches they've had on display have never really done anything for me, really.

Until yesterday.

They brought back the watch that comes with a tire pressure gauge, but I don't care so much about that one. No, they had an Omega Speedmaster. For $4500. :-( It's the first better-than-a-Fossil watch I've actually wanted.

Today they had something almost as awesome - pecan pies are back!! I'm guessing they're a good 12" in diameter, for $10. It's a sizable pie, and fairly delicious. They also added the big stack of "gift books" today, as they usually do before Christmas. They're always nice to look through, but I have no idea what I'm going to do with a 30"x18" picture book of India, or the complete works of .

Also, the built-in spell checker in Firefox 2 is a nice feature.