Saturday, January 6, 2007

My favorite breakfast by myself at home. House chores. Oatmeal. Errands. Today I notice for the first time that Walgreen's drug stores are now playing commercials along with music over the store's loudspeaker system. I think this is new—I can't remember hearing commercials before in Walgreen's. When I make my $46 purchase, I mention to the assistant manager that I don't like it—it's distracting and annoying. His response: "It comes from corporate." So I say, "Well, could you please let corporate know that I'll stop shopping here if you keep the commercials?" but I can already tell he's not going to do anything of the sort. I'm in the store already, right? I guess this is another reason to shop online instead. This is just as smart as companies putting pop-up windows with ads for themselves on their home pages. You have your customers right where you want them—don't annoy them or they'll go away! I really like Walgreen's. For the most part, their website works well (no guarantees, though, if you have any disabilities), and I have used their pharmacy services frequently in the past with a high level of satisfaction. The items they stock are decent to excellent, and their sale prices are usually really good. Once at the Walgreen's near Tower Market (or maybe it was downtown?) there was a problematic cash register that started beeping very loudly and the person behind the counter couldn't fix it after a long time (at least 30 seconds). Since I had been waiting in line with Patrick, I was trapped—I didn't want to leave the line and lose our place, but I also didn't want to hear the annoying beeping which to my ears was really, really loud—like a fire alarm. I eventually realized that the noise didn't bother Patrick who was in line with me, so without explanation I dropped all the items in my arms to the ground (hard to do carefully when I had fingers in my ears) and literally ran out the exit door to get away. I waited outside until Patrick completed the purchase and met me there. Aside from that incident, I can't recall any bad experiences with Walgreen's until today. Oh, and the Sony Metreon still plays film commercials. ynotswim had led me to believe that they don't have film commercials before previews, but they do. They weren't as annoying as the audio-only Walgreen's commercials, though. Home. Remi and Jesse were in the neighborhood, so they stopped by. I showed Jesse how to retouch photos in Photoshop using photos from new year's eve which I haven't uploaded yet. Remi and Jesse both took some of the items that Patrick and I no longer need—we've been creating a small pile of stuff we don't need. Jesse took some mint condition black and silver ski gloves I haven't used in 7 years, Remi took the photo negatives safe, and each of them took an air filter we haven't used since we lived in our previous mold-prone apartment. I felt a glow of satisfaction about the ski gloves—you know you made a good purchase when a fashion designer wants your clothes. We ate lunch at the Thai restaurant in Lakeside Village (Remi treated). Remi and Jesse took off. I napped. Woke. Cut my hair. Dinner at home by myself: rice pilaf with toasted almond, grilled mushrooms in olive oil with a smidgen of celery salt. Archived documents. Wrote thank you cards. I dropped my camera today—it was not secure in my pants pocket and fell out. It sounds different now when the lens opens and retracts. But it appears to still take photos correctly. I'm planning to attend Macworld on Friday, January 12, so if you're going to be there on Friday let me know and we'll meet up. There's some free Macworld social event on Thursday night I'm mildly thinking about attending, too. I had a good chat with our upstairs neighbor today about neighbory issues. Finally found time to troubleshoot the printing problems I've been having with our Brother HL-5250DN laser printer. When sending a print job, the printer motor would start up, and the printer would begin to pull paper from the tray into the printer, but then suddenly stop. The printer tray is frozen in an up position—you can tell because the blue indicator at the right edge of the paper tray is frozen in the down position. No paper jams can be found. Cycling power off and then on again results in the same problem. I think what fixed it for me was taking the paper out of the paper tray, cutting it in half (like a deck of cards), putting the bottom stack on top, then putting the paper back in the tray. Quality of paper might also make a difference here. We're using OfficeMax 24-pound paper. My print driver has the paper type set to Thin Paper. And after fixing this problem I turned off default duplexing in order to also reduce the page curl problem. Our newer Brother MFC-845cw all-in-one also seems to be fussy about paper quality—sometimes more than one sheet of paper will feed in when printing, resulting in (for example) one inch of your printout on one page, then the rest on the second page. Organized and labeled stuff. Used Velcro to organize one of our cabinets. Archived documents.