Sunday, February 05, 2012

Another Reason…

Despite the fact that I’ll be doing my Super Bowl shopping tonight, I decided to venture out into the world earlier today to swing by Staples to look for a small desk for my living room.
I’d like to have one if for no other reason than to fill up some of the wasted space, but also to use for when I work from home, as I usually set up the laptop downstairs rather than upstairs in the office, for a variety of reasons.
In any case, I thought that, while I was in the area I’d stop and get a haircut so that I’d have one less thing to do tomorrow.
On the way, I ended up behind this slow-ass driver, who, like Visa, was everywhere I wanted to be.
As I neared the barber shop, he turned into a different lane in the parking lot from the one I was headed for, so I thought that I was rid of him.  Instead, he cut across the parking lot and cut me off as he drove across the lane I was turning into.  As I was parking, he and his son (I guess) got out of the car and made a beeline for the barber shop.
*Sigh*
Fortunately, even though they were busy, and those two had, despite moving more slowly than I was moving, gotten ahead of me in line, they were fully-staffed and I only had to wait a few minutes.
Still, that sort of thing is exactly why I enjoy my Super Bowl shopping time so much.
I wasn’t able to find a desk that I wanted, but I did pick up a Bluetooth keyboard for the slate, which I’m using to type this post.  It was already reasonably affordable, but I was pleasantly surprised to learn that it was even cheaper than I thought once it was rung up.
That is, once I was eventually able to get it rung up, as there had been people in front of me who had unnecessarily slowed down the process of checking out by asking a bunch of stupid questions about whether or not they were really saving $1.45 on their order (they were).
I left there and decided to check out the desks at Office Depot, but I had no luck there, either.
So I came home and set up the keyboard on the slate, then decided to put my $200 Microsoft Store coupon to use by purchasing a copy of Office 2010.  I had been considering getting Office Professional, but it would have cost me an additional $200 just to add Access and Publisher, neither of which were programs I actually needed.  So I opted for Office Home & Business, which, after applying my coupon, only cost me $80 for two licenses.
For some reason, they ended up throwing in Publisher for free anyway, so, even though, as stated, I didn’t need it…score?
If anything, the Office programs I would even kind of need beyond what are included in Home & Office are Project and Visio, neither of which are included in any version of the Office suite of programs and have to be purchased separately.
I mainly wanted Office just to have OneNote for the slate, as it’s a very cool program and it’s ideal for use on slates.  In its inaugural use I put together a shopping list for tonight, saved the list to my SkyDrive, opened the note on my phone, and pinned it to my Start screen. 
I’m all tech-savvy and shit, and am kind of like a living commercial for Microsoft products at this point.
In any case, I mostly just typed this up for the purposes of trying out the keyboard – which, incidentally, is also a Microsoft product* – so I guess I’ll wrap things up for now.

*I’m not really an MS fanboy, but settling on one platform does make things a lot simpler for me.  I’m also not trying to get in Redmond’s good graces by constantly talking up their products here.  Not because I’m morally opposed to getting free stuff from them in exchange for saying positive things about them, but because I know that what I laughingly refer to as my “readership” is far too small to make it worth their while…

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