bierfaristo blogs

I have avoiding buying stuff since the financial crisis. But yesterday I ended buying a bunch of stuff. The big expense was a suit.

Alisa has signed us up to attend the Amherst 250th Gala -- an event that happens only every 50 years, according to Alisa. It's being organized by her friend Cinda and is "black tie optional". We considered renting a tux, but I decided that I might just as well buy a suit -- I probably haven't bought a suit since I graduated from high school. I hate shopping for clothes. The sales person was charming, but either mislead us -- or was poorly informed -- regarding the price. In the end, it didn't make that much difference, but left a bad taste in my mouth. It's a black suit and I got a black tie to go with it. I joked that Alisa could introduce herself and then say, "And this is my husband, THE UNDERTAKER". She can't really do the voice to carry it off, though.

I also bought a new wireless router for our house. I bought the previous one in September 2003. It was still working, but it had been getting flaky. For the past year, if the network connection went down, it was unable to re-negotiate a new IP address from Comcast. If I took my laptop down the basement, let my laptop negotiate the connection, clone the MAC address onto the basestation, and switch the cables, then the basestation could renew the address and hang onto it until the next power outtage. But it was a pain every two or three months. Also, lately, the basestation seemed to become unresponsive every few minutes and then would start back up on its own again. Hopefully this will fix that. I also bought a new RAM module for my netbook. I'm using my netbook enough that its useful to have the 2GB of RAM. I used it on Friday to make a favicon for a website with GIMP. A Macbook Air would be nicer, but this cost 1/5 as much.

I stopped at the Apple Store while we were at the mall and played with the new "magic mouse". It was better than I thought it would be, but I still like my basic, logitech 3-button scrolling mouse. I have to admit that gestures on the macbook trackpad make it better than a mouse for many purposes -- maybe even most purposes. There are a few things I prefer a mouse for (like playing StarCraft), but probably many of those things would be better with a tablet anyway.

I also played with the new iPod Nano and looked a bunch of little video cameras. I had proposed getting a bunch of them for students to use in the pandemic class. It would be fun to have students creating videos to document their activity. I have to admit that I've been a bit disappointed that having access to video equipment was not particularly transformative for me: I went through a phase where I shot a lot of digital video and made several movies. I discovered that (1) I'm not very good at it and (2) its very time consuming. Just what I need: another time sink to do stuff I suck at. :-) But it was fun, when it worked.