Personal

Apartment Hunting, or Not?

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It is that time of year again. Yes, summer time but that is not what i meant. It is time for me to renew my lease. I have been eagerly awaiting the paperwork from my current building to see how outrageous the rent increase will be. I have read that the average increase in NYC is 9-13% this year. That is of course crazy. I love my apartment, and my neighborhood but I don’t think i will want to pay that much to live here if the rent goes up. I am looking into alternatives, but everything is a trade off. My current apartments trade off is the cost. I have been pondering this issue for a while, and i still don’t have a final decision, but i know deep down that the rent increase is going to be so great that i won’t want to pay it. Can i afford it, maybe. The point is do I want to shell out that amount of money per month when I could get someplace nice for significantly less? If I do move the location might not be as nice. Of course that last statement isn’t true from some peoples points of view. So for now i just ponder my choices, and hope the right decision comes to me, eventually!

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X-33 Discontinued?

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Apparently my Omega Speedmaster X-33 has been discontinued from sale to the public. I love this watch, and when I traded up from a used one to a new one i was kind of ticked off that i had to wait 2 weeks for them to get it to me. At the time Tourneau did tell me that they only saw about 9 or so of them in Omega’s world wide inventory. Now that makes sense, since I am seeing people posted noticing that it had been discontinued about a month after i got mine. The final tip off was that Omega does not have it up on their website anymore. I guess that NASA still can order them, but the general public can’t. Lets hope that means i can still get parts for it beyond the typical amount of time for a discontinued model since they will still be making them for the government.

For me this is the perfect watch. it is a nice real grown up watch, but it has digital features also. I think it looks allot nicer than the comparable model from Breitling. Now that Omega isn’t making the X-33 any more I just need to be sure i take good care of mine.

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So This is Outside

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I went to the Sakura Matsuri Festival today at the Botanic Gardens in Brooklyn. I know, two days in a row leaving Manhattan really takes allot out of me! It was an interesting experience, especially since it is outside what I would normally do on my Saturday. I am still trying to figure out what was more interesting the festival itself or the people dressing up in costumes? There were the people in traditional Japanese costumes that you would expect, but there was also a noticeable number of people dressed up in Animea characters and other costumes. I even saw a guy dressed up as a transformer. It was just weird/interesting.

All in all it was a good day, except for the fact that after I got home I started to get a migraine. I took some Amerge and a 2 hour nap and I was allot better but not 100%. I ended up having to cancel my plans to go out with with some friends.

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Lazy Saturday

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I was up late last night so I decided to have a lazy Saturday. I just got back from some light shopping. I got a book at B&N, and some blank DVD. Nothing fancy. It is really nice out today.

I am not sure what my plans are for tomorrow or tonight for that matter. I am playing it by ear, but I don’t mind not doing much. This week was busy at work, and I was out half the nights also.

Why Do Some Stores Treat You Like a Criminal?

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Why do some stores in NYC treat their customers like criminals? I know most places out of NYC don’t do it, but some chains especially electronic stores like Best Buy seem to be treating everyone who buys something like a criminal these days. Every time I buy something at Best Buy I get badgered to show my receipt to some one at the door before I leave. It use to not be this way. I am a customer. Treating your store like a police state does not encourage me to go back and spend lots of money.

A few months ago on a consumer blog I read that unless a store is a members only store like Cosco, I am under no legal obligation to show my receipt if asked when leaving a store. I have tested this theory several times at Best Buy (hasn’t happened at CompUSA since I decided to try this) and so far I have not been stopped when I just ignore the guy at the door and continue on my way out. Is it sad that a small part of me wants one ignorant employee to try and stop me one time?

On the flip side I just got a new monitor at the Apple Store and walked out without a receipt (they email you a pdf of your receipt if your email is on file) and no tags or anything on the box. I asked the clerk about getting out of the store with no receipt and they were like you have to buy the monitor before we can give it to me from the back, so I don’t need a receipt to leave the store. See not treated like a criminal. And to make sure I compare apples to apples (no pun intended) I have bought computers at Best Buy that they can only get from the back of the store and I have still been asked for a receipt. How can some stores get it right, and others so wrong?

Rain Day

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It rained all day today. I stayed in and relaxed. I didn’t want to go out in the bad weather, and since it was Sunday and I had no firm plans I just relaxed. It was nice.

Easter Sunday Shopping

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Today I took advantage of the Easter holiday to do some cleaning, and some shopping. I have been pondering upgrading my computer monitor for some time. Apple just lowered the prices of their flat panels this week so it sparked my renewed interest in upgrading. I have a 20″ Apple Cinema Display, so many would say why in the world would I need to upgrade? I believe you can’t have enough screen real-estate. My vision isn’t so hot so the bigger the screen the better. I was looking at several 23″ & 24″ models during the week. Most of them are noticeably cheaper than the Apple ones, but they don’t look anywhere near as nice as the Apple displays. I wasn’t sure if I wanted to shell out $600 for a big piece of ugly black plastic.

Since I was on the fence with my decision I went down to the Apple Store. The 5th ave. store in Manhattan is open 24/7/365. And sure enough on Easter Sunday there was a line to get down the stairs into the store. It was packed. I found a 20 & 23″ display to compare side by side. The 20″ looks small compared to the 23″ one. Of course the 30″ is massive, but none of my computers could handle that display. I also like to put my desktop and laptop on a KVM and no KVM that I know of would ever handle the resolution of the 30″, so that one was out of the running for the foreseeable future. After standing in front of a 23″ display and browsing on the web for a few minutes I was convinced that this was the monitor I wanted, and that it was well worth the hefty price tag. I bought the monitor and caught a cab home and was up and running with the new display in 20 minutes. So far it is fantastic.

I have cleaned up my old 20″ display and put it back in the original packaging (yes I try to keep all of that stuff since I know I upgrade more often than most people) and it is ready to be sold to a needing friend or ebay.

Once done setting up the new monitor I continued to clean up my apartment. I pulled my Mini I had been using as a DVR computer. It was working great but I decided that wasting a Vista license and my Mini as a DVR was not worth it. I put back the old DVR box, but realized that the power supply was making rather nasty sounds. I never realized how bad it was until it was off for a week and then I turned it back on. I ended up pulling that computer also and I will use my Cable box DVR for now until I figure out what I want to do with the computer DVR setup I have.

Now I am off to mop and empty my dish washer!

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Good Friday

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After work I meet up with Jayson & Danny for some drinks at a cool bar. I was tempted to have a few drinks, but I kept to my self imposed limit of 2 drinks a night. We had a good time just hanging out and talking and drinking. We spent like 5 hours at the bar until Jayson and I wanted to go. Danny was still ready to drink however. He was pretty drunk. He ended up running out of room on the receipt while he was trying to write down how much tip to put on his credit card. It was kind of funny. On the plus side he made it home without ending up traveling 30 minutes in the opposite direction. That has happened on more than one occasion.

Work was a normal day even though it was the day before a holiday. It is freezing again, so I had out the winter coat again. I am not complaining since I like it cold, but I can’t stand it being so hot I don’t need a jacket one day and then I need gloves and a Pea Coat a few days later.

Clean Up

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I spent a nice part of this weekend cleaning up my apartment. It wasn’t that it was that diry, I did need a dusting and stuff but it was just getting too cluttered for me. I know if I just put stuff away when I was done with them like my mom tried to teach me I wouldn’t be in the situation, but I have no excuse. It is nice to have everything nice and clean though. I even did some re-wireing of some gear to clean up my TV stand thingie.

Not much else to report this weekend. I tried to take it easy since I am currently petrified of getting another migraine. I am going to do some more reading up on what can be done to help prevent them. I generally know what causes my migraines but taking some more proactive steps to prevent or decrease the chances of getting them seems like a smart idea after the week I had.

Once it does get slightly warmer I can go out and air up my bike tires and get some biking in. I am currently contemplating moving out of Manhattan for various reasons, but I don’t know where I would bike if I wasn’t so close to central park! I guess that is another reason to stay in the plus column.

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Back in the Swing of Things

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It is Thursday an I have successfully completed two days back at work. Both were filled with meetings and other stuff keeping me running around, so I am glad that I made it. Not much else going on in my life yesterday and today. I was glad I was able to make it through work. Jayson & Danny meet up Tuesday night for drinks. I missed it, but I was glad to get the rest. The trains ended up getting messed up so I was glad I I didn’t go out. The commute Wednesday morning to work was also screwed up from lingering issues related to Tuesdays train problems. Everything was back to normal today so I was happy.

I look forward to finishing the week without getting sick again and resting this weekend.