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!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

BMI & BMR Calculator (Body Mass Index and Basal Metabolic Rate)

Image
My wife has been researching type 2 diabetes and recently checked a book out of the library which included a body mass index (BMI) chart much like the one pictured here. Whereas it is fairly easy to follow, I, of course, think it must be converted to an online calculator! However, when I checked the Internet, there were already a billion of them so I had to make one that was different. So my lovely BMI BMR calculator accepts either inches or centimeters for your height and pounds or kilograms for your weight and calculates not only your BMI, but also your BMR (basal metabolic rate) which determines how many calories you should consume! So I made a spiffy "all in one" healthy body indicator calculator which not only determines how underweight or overweight you are, but also tells you how many calories you should consume to maintain or improve your ideal weight. 
Read more

Trying out the L'Ecole Culinaire Presentation Room restaurant

Image
We had been seeing the ads for the restaurant at L'Ecole Culinaire and since we live so close by we thought we would try it out. We had always enjoyed dining out at cooking or hotel schools like the CHIC in Chicago and the Statler at Cornell where we went to college. Since we still love to go out and eat here in St. Louis , we ventured over to their restaurant on the first day they were open for lunch. The first thing we noticed is that they do not have much parking! They really need to let patrons know where they are supposed to park. The restaurant itself is small but very well attended. There was one fellow who kept straightening all the centerpieces and place settings on the tables, and we always saw one or two student workers milling about. The lunch menu was small and the choices did not appear overly "gourmet". The special of the day was a bison burger stuffed with cheese, and other choices picked by my group included a club sandwich, a "margherita" pi
Read more

Not all Frosted Window Films are the same!

Image
We live in an older home with a lot of issues and one of them concerns our back door to our patio from our sunroom. The door has double paned glass on it, but unfortunately the seal has broken so you can see moisture collect inside of it. We decided the easiest way to "remedy" the problem was to cover the window with some "frosted" film so we did not have to see the moisture condensing between the panes. But the question was, what film? There are a bunch of them available so we had to select something to try on the door. The first place we tried was our nearby Lowe's store which had a bunch of Gila brand film. We selected what seemed like the typical adhesive based door sized  film that cost about $25 after tax. We thought it could not be that hard to put up and look nice on our door. So one day my wife ran out and purchased it at Lowe's and we commenced to install it on our door window. We made our own soapy water solution and followed the directions
Read more