Purchasing

Don't ever tell me that low-tech solutions exist to high-tech problems. Over the weekend, Suzanne had some stuff she wanted to copy and some images she wanted to print, so I fired up my HP OfficeJet 6310, one of those all-in-one printer/scanner/fax/memorycardreader/everything else devices HP is so good at producing. Well, the black cartridge worked fine, but the color cartridge seemed to have dried out. I didn't have a spare, since I don't really print much, so we went out to locate one, as well as some photo paper... I have two packs of photo paper, but couldn't find either of them.

Went to BestBuy, and their cartridges were wildly overpriced. Went to WalRusMart, and their cartridges were non-existent. So, we went home after getting something to eat.

We got home, and in spite of the warning on the cartridge saying ink may be harmful if swallowed, I licked the print head a few times, stuck it back in the printer, and it worked.

Nyaaaah.

File this next to all the times when computers have stopped misbehaving when I threatened them with great violence.

On a side note, is it just me, or does WalRusMart never seem to have what you need when you actually need it? We went over there seeking five things:

1. Cat litter deodorizing crystals
   
2. 4x6 Kodak photo paper
   
3. An HP #95 tri-color cartridge
   
4. Athlete's-foot stuff
   
5. Light bulbs
   

They had exactly two of these things... light bulbs and Lotrimin AF. No cat litter crystals, though they have stocked them for years. For that matter, none of the cat litter I like, though I won't count that against them because I wasn't actually looking for it this time. They had almost no color HP cartridges at all, even though most of the printers they sell are HP. I would say that 3/4 of the shelves for print cartridges were bare. Photo paper was vanished.

World's biggest retailer, my ass. They're so concerned about minimizing their costs that, at least in my case, they usually minimize their sales. I'll go to WalRusMart seeking seven or eight different things, I'm able to locate two of them, and then realize that it's just not worth the 20-minute wait for a slack-jawed cashier to ring just those two items up, so I dump them and walk out with nothing. Thus, WalRusMart gets $0.00 of my money, all because they wanted to maintain tight inventories.

Still, I'm not about to buy stuff like that at BestBuy and get seriously ripped off. I went over there the other day to get a simple six-foot USB A-to-A extension cable. They wanted... $34 for it.

When I got home, I looked it up and found half a dozen different sites with the same cable for five bucks.

Don't even think about getting FireWire cables at BestBuy. I think they assume that anyone who knows about FireWire automatically has more money than brains, and the price of cables shows it. Forget it.

Suzanne's move is almost complete. We spent the weekend moving things around, cleaning things, and burning trash (as well as some tall dead grass along the fences and under the peach tree). Thus, I still smell a little smoky today. People around Baltimore are freaking out with the prospect of us finally getting some interesting weather, and I sit amused. The forecast keeps mutating... first it was snow and ice tonight and snow all day tomorrow, now it's nothing tonight and ice and sleet and snow all day tomorrow. Wimpy school districts will almost certainly start announcing tomorrow's closing in a few hours.

Anyway, after work I will go get some photo paper just so that I know I have it, though typically, as soon as I write off something as lost forever and buy its replacement, I find the original.

I have about nine nail clippers.