This actually happened to me last weekend but I was to chagrined to post about it. Time heals all wounds though so it’s time to fess up.

I needed new sneakers. 2 years on the old timberlands and they were ready to give up the ghost, so last Saturday I headed off to the mall. After trying a couple of places I settled on a pair of Merrell’s . The only problem was I needed a pair in size 9.5, and the only pair in that size was way up on a high shelf above the shoe display, at least 5-6 feet over my head. I did a couple of laps around the store trying to locate a clerk but the only one I found was engaged with a family with kids, tracking down shoes for at least 3 kids and the Dad of the family. I’m not a patient man. I had noticed where the clerk stashed his stepladder so I snarfed it and headed back to my aisle. Unfortunately even on the stepladder, the shoebox I wanted was still just slightly out of reach. I decided I would try yanking quickly on the column with my pair of shoes in it, the idea being to grab the whole column, maybe 10-12 boxes of shoes. As I did this the whole wall of shoes started teetering, about to fall on my head. My instincts took over and I slapped both hands against the wall of shoeboxes, which settled them back in, all but the column of shoes I had been trying to pull out that is – this proceeded to fall in a jumble. Worse, though, was the fact that I fell off the ladder, landing awkwardly on my ankle and spraining it badly. I did manage to catch over half the falling boxes of shoes, but the rest made a huge clatter as they fell across the aisle.

Amazingly no one noticed this aside from the clerk, who came over in a rush from an adjacent aisle after hearing the crash, but by the time he got to me I had managed to push the ladder out of sight behind a rack, and had stuffed the fallen shoeboxes under a bench. I escaped without public humiliation at least, though a week and a day later my ankle is still sprained enough that I can’t run on it and it’s swollen up the size of a baseball. I do like the new sneaks though, so that’s something 😉

I’ve decided I will never buy another inkjet printer. I just passed my third one, an Epson 740, to Kevin, after getting so fed up with it this weekend that it nearly ended up in the garage under my 5 pound sledge. I decided to buy a laser printer, a Samsung ML-1710 that I had been eyeing for a couple of months. After some research I bought it from BestBuy.com and during the checkout process they noted that if I wanted I could do in-store pickup and not have to wait for the shipping. Sounded good, I went for it. This was Thursday last week. The printer had a rebate on it which expired on Saturday. Bestbuy promptly sent me an email telling me my order was in process and as soon as they confirmed availablity at my local store, they’d email me. This gave me pause, since they had just told me it was available during the checkout process, but whatever, I wasn’t planning to pick it up until Saturday.

Except Saturday rolled around and still no confirmation email. Finally I called them, a frustrating process since never in their phone hell voicemail tree do they mention how to get a hold of a person, and none of the choices were about cancelling orders, but ultimately I prevailed and cancelled the order when the person couldn’t confirm to me that my printer would be ready that day. I then went with plan B, which was to pickup the printer at Circuit City. Went through the same process of ordering online, including selecting in-store pickup, then drove to Circuit City and got my printer. Out of curiousity, I checked Best Buy since it’s right near the Circuit City, and they had a stack of at least 10 Samsung 1710’s sitting on the shelf. The lesson here is Best Buy sucks – don’t use their in-store pickup function. I am at least partly convinced this was intentional on their part – the printer was $20 cheaper at Best Buy, which had a $120 rebate compared to Circuit City’s $100, but which only lasted for 3 days – my bet is they would have given me my printer the day after the rebate expired. Or maybe they’re just technically incompetent, or ruled by their marketing department, which saw Circuit City’s advertising blitz for their in-store pickup feature during the NFL season and decided they needed to offer it too even if they couldn’t actually accomplish it with anything resembling efficiency. Whatever. Ultimately I don’t care, aside from knowing I won’t try using it again.

[the printer’s great so far, btw. Fast, relatively quiet, excellent output quality]

Google just introduced a number of features, the coolest of which is their new catalog search. They’ve scanned in tons of catalogs, from the common Dell and Crutchfield to the ‘bet you didn’t know this existed’ catalogs like the Hamilton Eye Warehouse. Just the fact that they’ve managed to get all this data scanned in is amazing – what’s even better is you can use full text search on the catalogs and their interface will graphically highlight where it finds your search terms right on the jpegs. The next time you’re searching for just the right prop for your hallowe’en party or some Wormwood for that next batch of Absinthe you’re planning to brew, give this a try – it works remarkably well for something still in beta.

I’m very pleased to observe that for the first time a gaming trade show is coming to the east coast. It’s not E3, but I’ll take it. You can already register for this fall’s GameonNY show, and at $10 for a 3-day pass it’s cheap. I’ll definitely be going and hopefully I will even manage to convince a couple of my friends to work with me as a team in the tournaments, even if we would be doomed to defeat at the hands of the 20-somethings.

I’ve got my fingers crossed that this will go over well and become an annual event. I’ve been jonesing to go to E3 for at least 10 years. I almost managed it once during my time with the newspapers, when they were sending me out on the trade show circuit 3 months out of the year, and my last boss and I discussed it as a possibility but never got serious about it. Now I finally have a real chance to check one out.

Anyone who’s going drop me an email or post a comment so I know who to try and pull together for some FPS tournament action.

I use a variety of websites on a regular basis to track prices on stuff, especially technology and videogames – sites like bensbargains and techbargains and the hot deals forums on anandtech. The sites are tremendously useful and I’ve saved a ton of money over the last couple of years – much more useful than places like pricegrabber, which only track official retail prices – but it’s a bit of a chore to pore over the listings each day when I’m looking for a deal on something specific.

Enter dealsites.net, which attempts to aggregate all the deals found on the other deal websites into one interface with a search engine, custom RSS feeds, and forums. It’s a little rough around the edges, but simply being able to set a custom search and get a notification of when, where and for how much a particular item becomes available is just great.

Check out the gorgeous blown glass sculptures at the Light Opera Gallery. If I was a slightly wealthier man I’d pick up this piece by artist Ed Kachurik in a heartbeat. Siblings take note, xmas gift potential is high on this site 😉

It’s a grey, sometimes rainy day today, so it’s fitting that I stumbled across unfortunate bit of research on Reuters. I’ve known for a while that I’m likely destined for a future with heart disease, but its still unsettling to see it portrayed in such stark terms. I lost my last girlfriend in large part due to my inflexible insistence on rigorous daily exercise. I wish I could send this link along for her to look at – it’s the reason why I’m so intense about it.

The only thing I can ask of folks reading this is to vote for candidates who support stem cell research and aren’t encumbered by reproductive issue-related policies. At present the stem cell research serves as the most promising research in the quest for a cure. I’m fortunate to be young enough that I can still hope for this – but only if enough folks vote on my side of the issue 😉

So Tech tv has been purchased by comcast and is being merged with g4tv. This is sort of a bummer – some of the techtv programming is pretty good. As goofy and content light as the screensavers is, I still watched it most nights while eating my supper and occasionally some gems would come across on air, plus they often had interesting folks in for interviews. G4 tv meanwhile has almost nothing going for it – they have very little actual content which they replay endlessly – the same half dozen half hour shows replay at least 10 times a week, and almost all of it is fawning coverage of the big game releases that’s no steps above adware. Visit their website for a glimpse into this actually – what you get instead of content is a request for demographic information about yourself before you’re allowed into the site. That about sums them up I think – I won’t grace this approach with an actual link.

Anyway…bummers. I hope the screensavers and X-play persist under the new management. And maybe some of the management folks from Techtv, accustomed to producing a significant amount of new programming on a weekly basis, will manage to push the new network in that direction. Frankly I doubt it though. My guess this is about economics – Techtv wasn’t doing well producing lots of content, and G4 tv was doing sufficiently well with their approach of ‘not much programming, and most of the new programming basically is infomercials’ so I bet Techtv is absorbed, screensavers goes on in some form, and most of the rest of it is killed off.

When I was a kid, my neighbor had The Dark Tower electronic boardgame. I loved that game, despite the fact that it its core it was a very simple luck-based game. I’m not alone in my nostalgia for the game though – a complete copy of it sells for as much as $300 on ebay these days. More to the point though, fans have recreated the gameplay, in the form of a flash version of the game and an offline java version. Not sure if you’d like to play? Go read a few reviews on the boardgamegeek.com site.

What is it about magnets that makes them so compelling? Whatever it is, it’s induced a serious case of geek lust in me for these mesmerizing magnets. $30 or so shipped is a little on the steep side for a silly office toy, yet still I’m going to indulge myself. Check out the video of them snapping together for a hint as to why.

[link courtesy of Jesse, though he hasn’t actually posted this to his weblog.]