My Black Saturday Purchases of the Year

Being a typical tightwad, I was not planning on purchasing anything this past Thanksgiving shopping weekend, but unfortunately my home network decided otherwise for me. It was Friday afternoon and we were awaiting the arrival of some family friends, when my son and daughter notified me that the home network was down. This was indeed a major catastrophe since my son goes into massive withdrawals when his Xbox Live is down and my daughter must check the Facebook status of her 500 Facebook friends at all times. I just thought it was again time to reboot my old Belkin router (which always seems to crash whenever my daughter is back from college -- how curious...) However, I tried resetting the router a few times as well as the DSL modem, and the router could not dial into my DSL account on the modem. I tried dialing directly into the DSL modem using PPPoE from my laptop and then my son's Xbox 360, and both of those could log into the DSL modem fine, but the router no longer could no matter what I did to it. Alas, it appeared I would have to purchase a new wireless router! I hate having to spend money!

Luckily I checked the Black Friday "weekend" ad at MicroCenter.com and noticed that they had a D-Link DIR-601 N 150 router on sale for an incredible price of $19.99. One of the nice things about Micro Center's website is that on Friday evening I could check the inventory at the Brentwood store and see they still had 11 units available at that price. So since we were busy Friday evening with company I could go there early Saturday morning and pick one up. They opened at 10:00am and I was there by 10:15am with my son in tow since he loves Micro Center as much as I do. Sure enough there was the $19.99 router although I only saw one on the shelf, which I quickly grabbed. While my son was checking out the latest Mac products I went online on a MacBook Air and checked Micro Center's site to see there were still 9 units there at the store, so besides the one in my hands there must have been 8 more either in the back or in other customers hands. Also while I was there we needed some blank CD-R media so I picked up a 50 pack of Windata CD-R's for $4.99. I noticed they had a 100 pack of Philip's for $11.99 and a 100 pack of Windata's available there for $9.99, so I stuck with the 50 pack. The Philip's cost 20% more per CD-R than the Windata's and the Windata 100 pack was the same price per CD, so why pay for the extra 50 CD's I did not need for a while? I bet they all come from the same plant in China anyway. Today while I am typing this up I also noticed the D-Link DIR-601 is no longer listed on the Micro Center site. They have a D-Link G router for $19.99 or the DIR-615 N router for $49.99 (after rebate) but my special deal is now gone. I did notice that Amazon has it for sale at my same price of $19.99 (which is actually being sold by CompUSA)

On a somewhat related note, I noticed that we have been receiving an unusually high number of SSH attacks this morning on our Linux systems, which I can tell since I am running DenyHosts on an Ubuntu 10.04 Dell system, and have it set to e-mail me every time it detects a new denied host. I am curious if the hackers are running more attack scripts on Cyber Monday thinking that all the IT folks are busy doing their shopping (both business shopping which is fine, and also their personal shopping which may not be as appropriate.) I have been constantly spammed by every legitimate online retailer we have ever used with all of their Cyber Monday deals, and there are a lot of great deals to be had for organizations that need to make hardware purchases right now. As for the SSH attacks, denyhosts had set 8 new denied hosts yesterday and already 3 new ones this morning, which is an unsually high number on that system. For example, I only had 7 total new denied hosts all of last week (Nov 21 through 27), and so far this week we've already had 11. Is it a coincidence this happened over "Cyber Weekend"? I think not!

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