Tag: shopping

I have been very near-sighted since I was in 3rd grade. After the optometrist completed my first eye exam, he called my mother in to ask “how did this child find his way to school?” As you might imagine, this makes me no stranger to wearing glasses. But during my high school/early college years I tried wearing contact lenses. I found them to be more hassle than they were worth, so I ended up going back to glasses. However while I had been wearing them, one thing I greatly enjoyed was having sunglasses.

One pair of sunglasses that were particularly nice had a blue tint to the lenses. It cut out all the glare and made dull, grey days seem more pleasant (grey skies would look blue). Since I’d gone back to wearing to glasses, I’d given up having sunglasses as prescription lenses cost too much for me to buy a 2nd pair. I tried glasses with clip-on shades but the clip-on broke and later pairs of glasses I chose didn’t come with them.

Then this year back in February I decided to try ordering a pair of prescription sunglasses online. I’d read several reviews of Zenni Optical and it sounded promising. So I poked around their site and ended up ordering a pair of titanium frames with mid-index, polycarbonate lenses and a 80% blue tint. Total cost $58.85. Compared to $251 for just a new pair of lenses from the local optometrist.

So if price is your only criteria, then Zenni Optical wins. However price isn’t my only consideration, for one thing it took over a month to get my glasses from them. Over a month with no communication from them on the status of my order until I wrote them. Then when I did write them, it took them several days to reply. Additionally it’s hard to correctly judge how the glasses will fit from just a picture and the measurements. I suppose if I’d paid more attention to the measurements given, I might have had less trouble but that’s how the cookie crumbles1. Also the images they have of how the various custom tints do a poor job of showing how things will look through them. It would be better I think to have a reference picture of something with know colors (e.g. banana, stop sign, etc…) and then various shots of the same item though lenses with the various custom tints. Something like that would have given me a better idea of the very, very bright a blue my 80% tint would turn out to be2.

Still they do a good job against bright sunlight and against snow-glare, which I had been somewhat concerned about. “Fortunately” we had several inches of snow fall around my house last night and so my new glasses got a good workout vs snow-glare.

Overall I’ve been pleased with my purchase but Zenni Optical’s customer service could use a bit of work.

1 The glasses don’t fit badly but the arms of the frame are a bit shorter than I’d like.
2 I’ve been told my new sunglasses look like “hippy-shades”.

  • Celebrating Obama’s election.
  • Trying to work my way through 100 push-ups, but having to restart a couple of weeks.  Especially week 4 which I’m currently on restart #3 due to holiday & snow-shovelling madness.
  • Panicking over the economy.
  • Beating my head against wxPython & Py2EXE.
  • Twittering
  • Enjoying a very Horrible Christmas1.
  • Reading a lot.
  • Pining for a new camera.
  • Buying new shoes as the sole of my old shoes had worn away enough to leak water in under the ball of my foot.
  • Attending holiday festivities with friends.

Update: Forgot to mention I was also participating in DrawMo, which is like NaNoWrMo but for artists. Well, I was sort of participating. In that I tried to draw something new every day but didn’t quite make it every day (but I did catch up on later days) and I’ve yet to scan/post my sketches for it. *shrug* Oh well.

1 Highly recommend both the soundtrack and the DVD, 5 stars, 2 thumbs up, etc, etc…

The week including the 4th of July was supposedly a short week, a week with less work days, and hence should have been a more relaxing week. As it turned out, it was more of a brutal week than I’ve had to deal with in a long time. Time at work has shrunk now that I’m once again work on our massive, quarterly update. Plus we’ve got another big project coming down the pipe soon. Then at home, well…

Wednesday, we hit up the Transformers movie with AWelkin and Bryon. The special effects were incredible, but the writing and directing sucked. I also thought the main human characters of the film overacted their parts, but others in our movie going party insisted they did a fine job working with the crap they were given. *shrug* I’m not an expert in movies so they could be right but in either case it was still a really bad movie.

Saturday, Ariesna and I got up early so we could hit up the farmers market taking place downtown and still have time to visit some garage sales. Now we do regularly visit the weekly farmers markets around town, but at a recent neighborhood cocktail party we heard that the first weekend of the month there’s a larger version which takes place. So we went and were unprepared for just how massive it was. The market took over several city blocks worth of streets and was jam-packed with vendors and shoppers. We found a stand selling some fruit tarts and bought one each for our breakfast as we looked around1. We also bought a few books at the library’s booth, some creamed honey and a loaf of pumpkin bread. Then we escaped, huzzah! *grin*

After leaving downtown, we parked the car at the house and walked over to the garage sales. Only again, we underestimated how massive it would be. There had been signs posted for roughly a week, giving the street, day and time. We’d also heard back at the cocktail party it would be 4-5 houses getting together to sell their stuff. Only it was more like 20-25, spread across 4-5 blocks. We walked around all of it and when we were at the farthest part of it, we found a stepladder for $10. Sure it’s old and probably not rated to support somebody of my size, but it was $10 and we’ve needed one ever since we moved into our house. Ariesna hung out with the ladder, while I walked all those blocks back to the house, gack. Then a quick drive over to pick up Ariesna and our new ladder. Whee!

Sunday, naturally having the stepladder meant I got to have the fun of climbing it and cleaning out the rain gutters on the garage. For extra fun, then I cleaned off the stepladder onto the garage’s roof and cleaned some of the house’s rain gutters. And then back down the ground, switching to the extension ladder we borrowed from Ariesna’s dad and finished cleaning all the gutters of the house. Yes, several times my vertigo did kick in. No, it was not pleasant. Oh and yes, our slightly tilted garage apparently did shift underneath me a bit while was moving around on it’s roof.

Combine all that err, fun with 90 degree heat and you’ll understand why I’m so pleased to be going back to work (where somebody else pays for the air conditioning).

1 Mine was rasberry/lemon, Ariesna’s was rhubarb. Mine was so much better.

Well, I finally feel like I am at least partly back from the dead. But really, that’s getting ahead of myself; allow me to backtrack a bit.

2005. May. 7th. Ariesna and I were joined in wedded bliss. Unfortunately with her just finishing her degree and paying for a wedding money was tight so we didn’t have the cash to go some place exotic and we couldn’t really afford to spend more than a night away. So I picked a B&B just a few hours drive away. A helpful friend had recommended it as the most romantic B&B in the area. After the ceremony & reception, we drove out and enjoyed our one night there.

2006. Ariesna and I went back to the same B&B for an entire weekend. We ate out at a couple of nice restaurants, did a little shopping and hit up an art museum while we were there. It was a grand time, but by the end of it we were both tired. We got home, chilled for a while and eventually went to bed. Blissful slumber was interrupted at 4:30 AM by me waking up feeling like I was choking and/or drowning. I ran into the bathroom and spent the next 15 minutes or so kneeling in front of the porcelain throne. After getting myself cleaned up, I tried going back to bed but woke up a while later with the same problem. Again, I eventually got cleaned up and tried going back to bed. Later, I got the intense fun of making a trip to the doctor on what was supposed to be the last day of my vacation. I got weighed1, poked, prodded and a q-tip was shoved down my throat2. The doctor confirmed I had the flu combined with a sinus infection. However he was worried that I was severely dehydrated and wanted to put me on an IV to get some fluids in me. Alas after much poking (in both arms), they realized I was too dehydrated for the needle to go in properly. Eventually, they gave up on the IV and let Ariesna take me home. Though they did tell her to keep pushing fluids down me and recommended she get me to drink 2 liters of gatorade that day and keep pushing the fluids at me the next. She did so, continually waking me up from some of the best sleep I’ve ever had to drink, drink drink. And I don’t even like gatorade! *sigh* I mean the fruit punch version isn’t too bad but the rest…. yeck.

Anyhoo, I ended up spending the entire week home sick and now the night before I finally go back to the office I am feeling much better. I’m just not at 100% yet. My sinuses throb (and continually drain down my throat) and on top of that I’ve got an evening cough3 which feels like it’s going to rip my throat in half. But I’m still taking the anti-biotics the doctor prescribed and I’m hoping when the pills are gone so will be the last of my health problems.

Oh yeah, if you’re wondering about the title on this post that’s pretty much all the food I’ve eaten in the last week. It’s been thrilling. 🙁

1 No, I’m not repeating what that lying hunk of metal claimed was my weight.
2 Apparently, that’s part of the test for strep throat. Only nobody warned me in advance. Incidentally, the test came back negative but it has a 15% chance of failure.
3 It only happens after 5. No idea on why that is, but there you have it.

Recently, I’ve been experiencing some problems getting iTunes & Windows to read/write from/to my iPod. Sometimes, both Windows & iTunes could see it but even then I could only transfer maybe 1 or 2 files before I’d start having problems. And occassionally, Windows should BSOD on me. I started browsing the Apple forums and found out I wasn’t the only one having this problem. But I’ve got an older iPod and my PC has onboard Firewire ports that I use to connect my iPod to. Finding somebody else reporting the exact same problems I was having was simple, but most times the solution mentioned was to switch from using USB connections to Firewire. After some more hunting around in the forums; I noticed that most people recommended using an Adaptec FireConnect 4300 to hook up your iPod to your computer. And yesterday while shopping for my brother’s birthday present at BestBuy; I noticed they had the card in the store. I thought about it but held off; as I hadn’t really tried out GTKPod under my Linux install yet. It started to work but my computer ended up freezing solid. I couldn’t SSH into it or get it to switch to another session to close out and had to power my computer off/on.1

So when that didn’t work; I decided I’d go back to Best Buy and get the card. I am ever glad that I did. Hooking up the iPod to the FireConnect 4300 works like a charm. Neither Windows or iTunes had any trouble reading/writing from/to the iPod and it feels like the music files get transfered over faster too. So if you’re having read/write problems with your iPod and you’re not using an Adaptec FireConnect 4300; buy one now!

1 I don’t blame GTKPod for this, as I’ve heard the 2.6.8 kernel has issues with Firewire drives and I am currently running a 2.6.8 kernel.