Wayne D's Blog

I was listening to Quirks and Quarks today and Gary Taubes was on the show talking about his book, Good Calories, Bad Calories: Challenging the Conventional Wisdom on Diet, Weight Control, and Disease. You can listen to the segment by clicking here. His hypothesis is that our obsession with fat as the cause of obesity has blinded us to the real culprit, carbohydrates. I encourage you to listen to the segment and draw your own conclusions. The book sounded interesting so I went to Amazon.ca to look it up and found it at a price of $20.13. With shipping and tax it came to $27.59. To check whether the purchasing power of the Canadian dollar had been reflected at Amazon I went to Amazon.com where the same book was priced at $18.45. With shipping included I could buy it for $27.43 U.S. I wasn't really surprised. The only reason I didn't buy it from Amazon.com was that the currency conversion fee on my credit card would have made it a wash in the end anyways.

I noticed the same price discrepancy this week when looking for a Novatel Wireless Merlin XU870 3G HSDPA 3.6/7.2 Mbps ExpressCard. Expansys.com has it for $379.95 on their U.S. website, $399.95 on their Canadian website. Both sites show 21 in stock, I bet they only have one warehouse and whether I buy in the U.S. or Canada their cost is the same.

You might have heard about the big tempest in the teapot over the release of an HD DVD code earlier this year. Geoff Smith made a song about it and Cali Lewis of Geekbrief.tvpodcast.

I always seem to get my great ideas for blog post when I'm in the car. I figure I won't forget them but when it comes time to sit down and write they have vanished from my head.

I have recently been looking around for a new printer to help break my families addiction to Lexmark ink-jet printer cartridges. More expensive than the finest perfume I keep finding exhausted printer cartridges strewn all over the house. I was looking for an inexpensive monochrome laser printer and have pretty much settled on the Brother HL2040 which Tigerdirect sells for about $120 but last time I was in the store they didn't have any in stock. I was in Grand and Toy last night and found a Lexmark E120N network printer marked down to $117 and I almost bought it until I realized that the toner cartridge it shipped with was only good for 500 pages and refill cartridges are $85 and are only good for 2000 pages. The Brother cartridges are $62 and are good for 2500 pages. I have never been able to get our Linux computer to connect to the Windows XP home box where the Lexmark ink-jet was installed so I was looking at network printers but wasn't prepared for the big step up in price. Tigerdirect had the network version of the 2040 on sale for $122 yesterday but I didn't have the time to make it to the store and I figured that they wouldn't have any in stock anyways. I had went in there previously to look at the Brother 2040 and they didn't have any printers on the floor at all. Imagine my surprise when I went on their website today and saw it still at $122 which is $60 lower than the normal selling price. I decided that it was worth the drive. Image my surprise when I get to the store and see a stack of printers. Imagine my disappointment when I see the price is $185. I pulled out my trusty Crackberry to make sure that I had seen the price from the website correctly, enter the Tigerdirect.ca URL and wait, the screen goes white and nothing happens. Sigh, the previous night the same thing had happened when I had tried to look up printer information on the Lexmark at the mall. The Crackberry said I had signal but the page wasn't loading. The previous night I had pulled the battery and reset the Crackberry which had seemed to help but I was suspicious of the signal meter. I went outside to see if I could get a better signal but it was still unresponsive. While waiting oldest son was fidgeting as only a 15 year old can. He was with me because I had taken him to have his hair cut before he looked too much like cousin It from the Munsters. I resorted to the low tech method of calling my wife and getting her to look it up on the website for me. She verified that I had not been imagining things so I went back inside and asked the sales guy. He took the price sign with him and told me that I was right and that the correct price was $122 and we are now the proud owner of a networked laser printer that works great from both Windows and Linux. I expect it will have paid for itself in 6 months.

I have four full garbage cans in the garage that I dragged out to the curb on Friday morning expecting to be picked up. Evidently I had my weeks wrong because when I came home from work they were still there. We are now on a biweekly garbage pickup schedule with recyclable and organics picked up weekly. I would have been much happier with two cans every week. Separating out the organics seems to have attracted fruit flies. I bought a package of new high tech flypaper today to try and keep them under control. It's a sticky plastic square with pictures of fruit on it. I was hoping to find one of those old retro coils that hang from the ceiling but was unsuccessful.

By the way, the Crackberry seems to be working fine now.

I have been underwhelmed with the TV offerings this fall. Other than new episodes of Tripping the Rift and Pushing Daisies there is nothing new I am watching. Darn I forgot Chuck and Reaper, my guess would be that Reaper won't make it through a full season. The new season of Heroes has also not impressed. It seems that half of every show is subtitles and a show that used to speed by now drags like a square wheeled cart. The only part are like is the part with Hiro and his adventures in feudal Japan. I also tried watching Dirty, Sexy Money but didn't find it compelling enough to keep up with.

Saturday's Argos game was a blast. The Argos won, the band split up and a small group of us wandered the stadium reprising the Argonotes stchick of seasons past. There was our standard trouble finding a new way to get off the field at the end of the game. I wandered down to Harbourfront where I had parked my car and bought a chicken curry hoping to reprise the experience of curry and chips from Ameen's takeaway in Newcastle. Sadly the experience was not very satisfying. I ate it sitting down on the windblown waterfront where the tour boats were docked awaiting the return of summer. Winter is coming, you can feel it in the air. This weekend it's off camping again, maybe it will snow.

My new 500 Gbyte Seagate drive is spinning away and I now have so much disk space I don't know what to do with it. Of course there is a saga to go along with it otherwise I wouldn't be writing about it.

Last weekend Tigerdirect.ca put these drives on sale for for $109.99. Sunday afternoon I went to the Markham store and they told me they were sold out. I asked for a rain check and the guy behind the counter gave me a business card with the drive part number written on it after telling me they didn't give out rain checks. He told me they were expecting a new shipment on Tuesday. I went home and decided to buy it on their website, but when I found out that shipping was $15 I decided not to. $15 shipping on a $110 product reminded me of eBay and the way people make their money there. I guess it's probably their minimum shipping cost and the $8 for the SATA cable and the power adaptor didn't raise the shipping cost that much. Tigerdirect.ca total cost before shipping and taxes $117.97.

I stopped by Tuesday night on my way to play trivia and another guy told me that their shipment had come in but that it took a couple of days to unpack, he didn't know if there were any of the drives in the shipment and I should call and ask if they had any in stock before I came over next time. This was irritating for two reasons:

1. The drive question was a featured product on the website, wouldn't it make sense to try to keep your featured products in stock?
2. Tigerdirect's Canadian headquarters are about one kilometre from the Markham store, couldn't they put a few in a car and drive them over?

I figured I'd call them today (Thursday) and see if they had the drive in stock I went to the Canada Computers website. They have a location in Vaughan that is on my way home so I thought I should check out their prices. They showed the Seagate drive priced at $119.99 but had a Western Digital Drive priced at $109.99. When I got there they had a sign in the window saying the drive was on sale for $114.99. The strange thing was that the Western Digital drive was priced at $116.99. I decided to just buy the drive from Canada Computers and not worry about the five dollars. I got the drive and the two cables and went to the check out and when the guy rang it up he charged me $116.99. It turns out that the $114.99 price was the cash or debit discounted price. Oh well, seven buck more but at least I had the drive. After he told me that he said that he'd throw in the two cables for free. In the end I ended up paying less than I would have paid at Tigerdirect.

There were a few new shows that looked interesting but having been burned in the past I try to stay away from shows in their first season. The ones I like invariably get cancelled and I end up disappointed. The late start and my lack of subscribing to a newspaper that supplies a printed TV guide also means I never know when a new show will premiere. I have been watching Californication but it has went downhill in the past few episodes and now I find it disapppointing. I watched a few episodes of Blood Ties but it didn't really grab me and I can't keep track of when it's on. Chuck seems pretty good from the one episode I saw. Now I just have to remember when it's on. I also thought the first episode of Reaper looked good but I managed to miss the second one.

Election day is Wednesday, I think I'm in a new riding but I'm not sure. I'm not sure our local politicians have done a very good job campaigning, there aren't even any lawn signs on our street. One very nice lady did come to the door campaigning for the Conservative candidate in the riding but I haven't seen hide nor hair of the others. I don't watch TV news anymore and haven't been following the campaign so I'm not sure who I should vote for. I guess I'm not a very good voter. I do know that I am going to vote against the harebrained Mixed Member Proportional voting system that the governement is trying to foist on us.


I got to conduct the Argonotes yesterday. Our regular conductor was out of town at a wedding and he let me take over the band. It was fun but stressful. When the word comes from on high via the headset you have 10-30 seconds notice to get a herd of cats all going the right at the same time. Then we play for anywhere from 30 seconds to 2 minutes and then it back to being perched on the pointy stick. I really shouldn't call the band a herd of cats, they were very charitable to me, their neophyte conductor and we sounded really good. I also learned what to not do the next time, if there is a next time. Thanks Steve.

This month's emusic.com downloads were a bit short, I left it late and didn't realize my downloads were going to refresh so early, I only managed to download 28 of my 40 songs before it reset to forty. The 28 I did get included Paul McCartney's Memory Almost Full and Leigh Nash's Blue on Blue. Thanks for the recommendation Chris.