Author: jcalvert

I read this quote from Arthur Blank, owner of the Atlanta Falcons, in the January 19, 2009 SportingNews:

“Support your values (and) all the right solutions will come out of them.”

Seems like a very reasonable philosophy; words to live by.

No thanks to FedEx, after three delivery attempts the SOBs finally delivered my new Dell Inspiron 1525. In this day and age of a struggling economy, I cannot believe the piss poor service offered up by FedEx. But I am starting to digress …

Dell Inspiron 1525
My first Inspiron 1525 impressions is that it is a decent laptop for the price (a shade under $900). I have spent some time over the last couple of days transferring files, programs, and data from the old Dell Inspiron 6000.

I have everything almost sorted except for email. I did not realize that the Home and Student edition of Office 2007 does not include Outlook. I probably use gmail more than Outlook, but my wife is comfortable with Outlook. I guess for that matter I am as well, but I’m not sure that Outlook 2007 is really worth $90 or so dollars.

When the Inspiron 6000 started going south (IE was crashing the computer, causing Blue Screen of Death, go figure) I got my wife to switch to Opera, which could be dangerous. I have always used Opera for the naughty searches … sure my wife (probably) knows, but she never really bothered to use anything else other than IE. So switching email clients is probably not going to be a problem. Damn progressive wives make naughty searches difficult.

OK, back to the new Inspiron, it seems fast enough and plenty capable. I was a little worried if only getting 3GB of memory would be enough to keep Vista happy, but everything seems to be running smoothly. The 15″ screen is nice, crisp, displays pretty pictures, and everything is running pretty quickly. At least I have no reasons to complain yet about loading browsers, iTunes, Word, Excel, etc.

My only real complaint is that I do not like the “touch” pad style buttons for volume control. The Inspiron 6000 has real buttons on the front edge, but I guess I can learn to adapt.

Vista
I really did not know what to expect, but my first impressions are that Vista is not too shitty. If the OS does not crash then I will have no real complaints. I am sure there will be things that cheese me off, but we are still in our honeymoon period.

I have been happy playing iTunes Party Shuffle with the album covers displaying. Sounds stupid, but the Inspiron 6000 struggled pushing graphics, so I after three years we were probably missing out on some of the newer, cooler stuff. I did slog through World of Warcraft and Out of the Park Baseball, but playing sessions were often more of a choppy slideshow than a real gaming experience.

I have become completely addicted to “tagging” images in Windows Photo Gallery. Good grief! I am trying to get everything pushed to this computer just so I can sort through what is what. Bet I fill up the 250GB HDD fairly quickly.

I have never played around with Google Widgets, but I like the little slideshow widget. Of course it got me in a little hot water when a body painting of Tori Praver displayed. Oops!

Enough Vista for now. Back to tagging images. Happy Saturday!

My new Dell Inspiron 1525 was due to arrive today, but unfortunately, no one was home when the FedEx person stopped by the house. I decided to call FedEx and ask if they could try to deliver again today or if I could pickup the laptop from the main FedEx delivery/shipping station.

What does the FedEx customer service rep tell me? First, I would have to put a “hold” on the package in order to be able to pick it up from the local delivery/shipping office. The kicker is that this requires two business days. Second, the CSR could not tell me when FedEx would attempt to delivery tomorrow. I explained that I needed to know to ensure that someone was at the house to accept delivery of the package. I was basically told so out of luck; delivery times were not defined.

Next I explained that I actually paid for second day shipping, not for three to five days service. I was told that there was really nothing else that could be done to solve my problem. You have to be kidding me, right? When I explained that this approach was not very customer service friendly, I was told that was just the way it is.

Un-f’ing believable. You would think in times of poor economic conditions that every company would do everything they could in order to maintain high customer satisfaction and in order to retain customers. Not FedEx.

My wife’s Dell Inspiron 6000 has been on the fritz lately, but then again it is a little over 3 years-old. The DVD/CD burner unit will no longer play CDs, much less burn anything. The system is having more frequent blue screen of death messages, but it is not like I can fdisk and start over since the CD player is not working. It has been a decent laptop. As documented here, Dell had to replace the keyboard and lcd/screen, power supply, and I am now on battery number two; typically stuff for a heavily used family computer.

Last weekend I ordered a Dell Inspiron 1525 (Pentium Dual Core T3200 2.0GHz 667Mhz, 1M L2 Cache) with minimal extras – 3MB memory, 250MB HDD, and 8X DVD+/-RW dual layer drive. I also had to pony up a little extra to get MS Office 2007 Home and Student Edition in order to get Word, Excel, and Outlook. This Inspiron 1525 has nice 15.4 ince WXGA LCD TrueLife (whatever that means) screen. I pretty much scrimped on everything, even opting to not include the $25 built-in 2.0 megapixel camera in order to keep thing puppy under $900 (including taxes and second day shipping).

Did I mention this Dell comes with Vista (SP1 Home Premium Edition)? I am not too excited about that, but I did not want to spend the extra $150 to go the XP route. Man, I hope Vista is not a total train wreck.

I really wanted to go with a Mac laptop, but for now, I figured it would be better to get my wife a decent computer for everyday use. One she could use for email, web surfing, and the like. I will also use it for budgets and web surfing, and maintaining this site. The Dell Inspiron 1525 seems like a decent deal, unless the Vista monstrosity requires more horse power. I could have gone with bigger and better for a few hundred dollars, but I really did not want to spend the extra cash right now.

The new laptop should be here Tuesday (maybe Wednesday). More to come later.

Good grief! It has been a long Bowl season, but it finally comes to this …

FedEx BCS National Championship: #2 Florida (12-1, 7-1 SEC) vs. #1 Oklahoma (12-1, 7-1 Big 12). SEC vs. Big 12 to determine the top dog, and to end the debate for the best conference. Or does it? The Pac-10 went a perfect 5-0 this year; SEC and Big 12 will end the Bowl season with 2-3 losses.

No matter what else happens, there should be plenty of debate over the participants in this game. I do not think there is much question that Florida should be here (SEC bias), but what about Oklahoma? What about Texas? USC? Utah (who am I kidding)?

The line for this one has been all over the place, but always in favor of the Gators. I have see it as low as 1 and as high as 4. As I write this, the Gators are laying 3.5 to the Sooners.

Gators are the pick. This one will be close, but in the end Gators will pull out a 9-13 point margin of victory.

Record to date: 18-12.

The penultimate edition! Last night I lost against the spread, but no matter, I will always take a Texas win. Good thing for Ohio St. fans; they actually showed up for a Bowl game. Now all the talk will begin about how Ohio St. was not such a completely shitty team; anything to make the Big Ten and Ohio St. feel better. 1-6 in Bowls games this year tells the true story for the Big Ten. Their lone win was against a .500 South Carolina that was obviously not Bowl worthy.  Hey, if you want to have the Iowa Hawkeyes carry your banner, that is your own business.  Good luck with that one.

GMAC Bowl: #22 Ball St (12-1, 8-0 MAC) vs. Tulsa (10-3, 7-1 C-USA). I am going to go with the Cardinals dropping two in a row. The Golden Hurricane is giving up 2.5, but they will win by a couple of scores.

Record to date: 17-12.

Lucky 13 brings us to the final three games. And you thought there was just tonight’s Orange and Thursday’s BCS match-up. Nope. Do not forget about tomorrow’s all important GMAC Bowl, but I digress because it is time to Hook ’em!

Tostitos Fiesta Bowl: #10 Ohio St. (10-2, 7-1 Big Ten) vs. #3 Texas (11-1, 7-1 Big 12). Even if the Buckeyes did not have a recent history of … cough, cough … poor play in Bowl games, would you take them and 7.5? Heck no! Texas is the pick!

Record to date: 17-11.