Caught In The Whirlwind
Posts tagged amazon
The Amazon Lottery
Jun 1st 2009
After messing around with Photoshop, as per my previous posting on the subject, working on a layout for my personal site nopurpose.org (the work in progress bit on that layout is here if you're interested in it) it became apparent that having a graphics tablet would be a prudent thing to do. After doing some research, I settled on a Wacom Bamboo Fun.
I made extra sure I had room in the budget for it and bought it off amazon.com (they were selling it for $15 under it's suggested price). But then I had a conundrum. Did I want to send it to the apartment where it will sit in the hallway waiting for somebody to get home (or if the carrier was UPS and they required a signature for some reason…have it bounce) Send it to work and risk it arriving on a Saturday if they picked the US mail option? Send it to my parents and have it arrive after I go home so I have to wait a day to get it?
I decided it was big enough where they'd probably use UPS, so I sent it to work. Unfortunately, I lost. It's coming by US Mail. Daaaah. Freaking amazon. I wish they were able to tell you what shipment option they were using for orders.
Textbook Shortage?
Jan 17th 2007
I bought my books for school today (admittedly a little late, considering I’ve got my first class tomorrow). I found the 4 books for my Western Civ class all right. One textbook and 3 novels. My Constitutional Law class, however…
The bookstore didn’t have it, so I took down the ISBN number and checked online. It’s out of stock at both amazon and barnes and noble, so I had to go with ordering it used through one of amazons 3rd party marketplace sellers. Hopefully it gets here asap. And hopefully I don’t need it for tomorrow night’s class.
QotD: In My Shopping Cart
Dec 15th 2006
Where do you do your online shopping?
Depends what I need, usually. The place I go the most for general stuff is amazon.com because they’ve generally got whatever I’m looking for and the price is usually pretty good as well. That and I get double rewards for using my visa card there.
For computer parts, the first place I check is newegg.com. The prices may not be as low as some other places, but their service is good and they ship fast.
And most recently, I’ve purchased from Toysrus.com which I’m really, really happy about because I may have potentially found myself a Wii. It hasn’t shipped yet, but from what I’ve read, the people who didn’t get in on the deal in time have already gotten e-mails saying that the item is backordered and I’ve yet to receive anything. The order status page says that my items have been located in stock, so I’m cautiously optimistic.
Thanksgiving And More
Nov 25th 2006
I’ve been a bit busy/too lazy recently to update here, so I’m going to catch up on a couple days worth of activities here.
Thanksgiving was fun. I woke up that morning with dreams of getting myself a $100 XBox 360 from amazon.com due to a promotion they were running. Unfortunately, that wasn’t to be. The load crashed amazons servers for about 15-20 minutes and by the time I got in, it was sold out since they were only offering 1000 of them. Oh well, it was worth a try. Both my helpers came up empty too. (I had my dad and a friend of mine madly refreshing as well).
So I went over to my parents house in the morning to do the traditional Christmas decoration setup. We get the argument portion of the holiday over and done with there by arguing about the most efficient method of setting up the tree (as mentioned before, it’s a nice artificial one. Looks pretty real until you get close to it). During which, we watched the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade and then I somehow convinced my dad to watch a little of the national dog show. Not that I really wanted to watch it myself. I just wanted to see if I could get him to do it.
Dinner was good. It’s been a long time since I’ve had turkey that wasn’t in a sandwich. My mom didn’t enjoy the cooking quite so much as we enjoyed the eating though. I have a feeling we’re going to be going out to eat again next year.
So Black Friday rolls around and I get the stupid idea to go out later in the afternoon to pick up some items, as well as check around and see if there happened to be a Nintendo Wii out there that had been overlooked in the mad rush. Of course there wasn’t. And it was still a mad rush out there. According to my sister who works at the Staples across the street from Best Buy, people were lining up there starting at 6PM thanksgiving day and by the time she got into work in the morning, the line had already gone way past several of the other stores in that same section of buildings. That’s just…nuts.
So this afternoon I’m going to a little gathering with some friends where we’re going to test out the party abilities of the Nintendo Wii. Been looking forward to this for a while. I guess we’re going to have 4 controllers and a bunch of game type things. My arm is going to be sooo sore tomorrow.
Amazon Unbox?
Sep 8th 2006
If you haven’t heard yet, Amazon.com just released a new service for downloading movies and TV shows. Prices varry widely. TV shows generally run $1.99, movies can range anywhere from $7 to $20 for a purchase, and from $3 to $5 for a rental.
Yep…rentals. That’s the interesting part in all this to me. Instead of buying the movie outright, you can just rent something. It’s cheaper, but you need to watch the movie within 30 days of purchasing and as soon as you hit play, you have 24 hours to watch the movie before it gets deleted. It seems to me to be a great way to watch a movie you wanted to see but didn’t feel like buying the DVD for. Although, due to pricing, if you watch a lot of movies, a service like Netflix might be a better way to go. For the amount I watch though…it might be handy sometimes.
The quality of the movies are pretty good. I Bought V for Vendetta as my first movie and then rented One Hour Photo since I’ve wanted to see that anyway. Amazon says the movies are DVD quality, however, it’s just a little bit less than that. Very, very watchable. I’m willing to be a lot of people won’t be able to tell the difference between this an a DVD. The movies are about 2.2GB in size, and a lot of them (not the rentals) come with a smaller version which was compressed specifically for portable players.
I did have a few problems though. First the player itself. I sometimes have problems with the player application not connecting to amazon to download new purchases. I had to restart my computer to get it working for some reason. Also, the download speed can be kinda slow at times. For a 2GB movie file, 165KB/sec isn’t going to cut it 
It might just be because it was getting hammered with everyone trying it out. You can watch movies as they’re downloading but only after a certain amount of the file has already been downloaded.
Onto the movies. The aspect ratio listed for V for Vendetta was incorrect. It said widescreen, however the download I got was pan and scanned *shiver*. Even though One Hour Photo says it has a 5.1 soundtrack, I can’t get it to play anything except 2 channel stereo, but I’m still trying And I’m not sure if it’s just due to the DRM on One Hour Photo, but I can’t skip to a certain time in the movie. You hit play and watch it straight through…if you close it in the middle, it won’t remember your spot so you have to watch it all the way back through again. I noticed V for Vendetta allowed me to skip to wherever I wanted. Maybe it’s just a rental thing.
Anyway, it looks pretty interesting to me with some reasonable prices for what they’re giving you. It’ll be cool to see how things end up down the line since all of this stuff is still very early adopter. I’m probably not going to use it much, but I can see myself renting an ocasional movie
UPDATE: This was written before I found out that it installs a service that runs all the time and phones home to Amazon a couple times a day. BAD software. BAD!
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