Deals! What do purchases say about you?

Deals! Deals! Deals! The funny thing about deals is that they can make you buy things you never intended to. I didn't really need a waffle maker, I just thought it'd be cool to make my own fresh and everything. I used it a total of one time before shoving it somewhere I can't get to it without a complicated set of maneuvers involving boxes and back pain.

I subscribe to daily emails from Slickdeals.net and 3-hourly ones from Fatwallet.com to keep track of deals. It means, of course, that I miss out on most of the deals which usually get snapped up in minutes, if not seconds. Which is fine by my wallet, which would never survive a whole day of real time deals.

And what are these deals for? What would these purchases say about the people buying them? Some of this stuff is supposed to be for reselling on eBay, but even then it means there's quite a market for this stuff. As far as I can tell, Slickdealers/Fatwalleters/eBay buyers are chocolate-loving, coffee-loving, rice-loving, body building, computer building, media loving, gun toting fashionistas quite possibly with revolving balances on lots of credit cards. After all, you can never have too many candies (like Candy House Chocolate Truffles in Gold Foil - Reception Accessories (Google Affiliate Ad)), K-cups, rice cookers, pounds of whey protein, computer parts, BluRays, TVs (like Samsung 46 " Black LED 1080P 120HZ HDTV - UN46EH6000 (Google Affiliate Ad)), ebooks, guns, shoes, and credit cards. Especially when they're 70% or more off or even free! Never mind that you'll never read all those ebooks; they just look cool on your 50% off ereader.

Coddled Kids Run Wild

You know you're old when you find yourself saying, "Those damn kids!" Kids are more wild than ever and it can't help when parents coddle them more than ever. If you're a coddling parent, no offense, and give your kids some room to learn to live without you, because someday they'll have to. (Sorry, but you really had to hear that.) If you're a coddled kid, grow up and stop hiding behind your parents; one day you'll have to stand on your own. (Sorry, but you really had to hear that, too. And please stop throwing rocks at my window.)

Why are grade school age children running around unsupervised all day and night during the school year? They meandering down the center of a busy avenue right outside my window. Yes, really. Cars zooming by all around them. It's a miracle none of them have gotten run over yet. Singly, in pairs, or in small groups, they just roam the streets without any adults during the school day in a neighborhood where at least one registered sex offender lives.

Isn't it enough that they get more snow days off than any previous generation did? It wasn't too long ago (not decades anyway) when I had to walk to school the day after it snowed six feet. On top of several more feet from previous days. Now they cancel school if the forecast even mentions flurries (but the sky doesn't even manage a single flake). Apparently, it's all about the probability of over involved parents ready to sue. Lay off guys, your kids are going to have to slip and slide on ice/sleet/snow sometime.

How are kids supposed to learn if you don't make them go to school? How are they supposed to manage when you're not there to hold their hands, provide for their every whim, and do everything for them? Please don't do their homework for them, you might get it wrong anyway. Ever seen that show Are You Smarter Than a Fifth Grader? Most American adults really aren't. Nowadays, parents are getting to involved with their kids' professors and even their job interviews. When's it going to stop? Are you still going to do their work (and laundry) for them when they're middle aged and you should be retired? You should be relaxing then, and they should be taking care of YOU. Instead, they won't be able to care for themselves, let alone anyone else.

The Invincible Iron Man 1966

• Where do I get one of those suits? Why settle for an electric car that you charge from any old outlet when you can have a rocket powered, beam emitting suit of armor? I wonder if he's got international adapters for that thing?

Shiny!

• Can you hear me now? You've got to love the visual sound effects. Zitt! It's not just a zit but a zitt, watch out, it might squirt something deadly! Wok! Watch out for flying woks! Bong! Well, now that would be quite a smoke. The one I like most though is Fwoof! It sounds downright fluffy. It's also interesting how Clank! and Ring! came out sounding like the same glub.

• Upgrades and more upgrades! He upgrades suit 3-4 times in 13 episodes: switching to a less clunky (and less blinding) suit by episode 2, having another utterly destroyed by an enemy later on, building a brand new one to save his pal Happy Hogan (who happened to be posing as him, etc. The iron suits rusted, yuck! He got challenged by a Titanium Man. He really should have built one of adamantium or vibranium, or a layer of each, or something.

• Politicians will be politicians. Isn't it comforting to know that politicians weren't any smarter way back when? Congressman What'sHisFace keeps demanding Tony Stark to appear before Congress to reveal the secrets of Ironman's armor. Because, you know, telling a bunch of politicians -- and whoever else might be lurking around -- will ensure that the country remains safe. Safe from who? Ironman, an independent agent who -- although constantly fighting on the side of good -- might, by some extremely remote possibility, turn on the country at any time? From the bad guys continually trying to take over or destroy the world who would love the increased opportunities to steal said armor secrets?

Unfortunately, Amazon doesn't seem to have a completr set of these available, but if you're nearly as old-fashioned as Al Bundy and you still have a working VCR (but sadly no Betamax), individual episodes are on VHS.

Episodes 2 & 5: The Death of Tony Stark & The Crimson Dynamo

Episodes 7 & 9: If I Die, Let it Be with Honor and The Other Iron Man

You'll have to find  the rest yourself.

• Episode 1: Double Disaster, Enter Happy Hogan, Of Ice and Men
• Episode 2: The Death of Tony Stark, The Hands of the Mandarin, The Origin of The Mandarin
• Episode 3: Ultimo, Ultimo Lives, Crescendo
• Episode 4: The Mandarin's Revenge, The Mandarin's Death Ray, No One Escapes the Mandarin
• Episode 5: Crimson Dynamo, The Crimson Dynamo Strikes, Captured
• Episode 6: Enter Hawkeye, So Spins the Web, Triple Jeopardy
• Episode 7: If I Die, Let It Be With Honor; Fight On, For A World Is Watching; What Price Victory?
• Episode 8: The Moleman [sic] Strikes, The Dragon of Flames, Decision Under the Earth
• Episode 9: The Other Iron Man, Death Duel, Into The Jaws of the Death
• Episode 10: Cliffs of Doom, The False Captain America, The Unmasking
• Episode 11: My Life For Yours, Black Knight's Gambit, Menace of the Monster
• Episode 12: Dream Master, If A Man Be Mad, Duel In Space
• Episode 13: The Beauty and the Armor, Peril in Space, As A City Watches

I'm a Windows Curmudgeon

I stuck to Windows 3.1 forever. Then Win95, and now XP. I  really don't want to move on, not to Windows 7 and definitely not to the upcoming 8 (where they can track everything about you but your very thoughts, wear a foil hat just in case). What I really want is a Mac; but can't afford it, of course.

But when the Internet tax beast rose up in PA, I had to make one last Amazon.com purchase before it hit. Which is why I bought this lovely thing : ASUS N56VM-AB71 Full-HD 15.6-Inch 1080P LED Laptop.

I figured it might be time to move on to something past XP. I was wrong.

On XP, I press the Windows Key. Then press F. That opens Firefox. So quick and simple for anyone with even moderate hunt and peck typing skills.
On Win 7, I press the Windows Key. The press F. The accursed "convenient" search box gives me a list of stuff. I have to press arrow keys a bunch of times to maybe get the the option I want; I say maybe because sometimes the arrow selection is stuck who knows where. Or I have to scroll the trackpad over from across the infinite expanse of my screen to fiddle around the list and just when I've got the pointer positioned and am ready to click, bam!, the pointer slipped, and I clicked the wrong thing! I could pin Firefox to the Start menu in that nasty white box on the left but that too requires some strange voodoo involving lots of arrow keys and/or slipping mouse pointers.

On XP, everything was fairly fast.
On Win 7, everything takes forever with a lot of thrashing to load. This is on a system that's 20x more powerful than my XP rig!

On XP, fewer warning when I try to delete crap.
On Win 7, TrustedInstaller won't let me delete the hideous sample music, and videos, and pictures, and wallpapers, and Multilingual User Interface (MUI) files for languages I'll never use (I speak, read, and write only US English, please uninstall the rest so it doesn't take up my entire drive and resources, thank you). Yeah, I did find the fix. But no one should have to go through all that. Why bother deleting the crap since the hard drive has plenty of space, you ask? Because every time you do a disk defrag, or search or malware scan, your system will have to go through the 1000s of extra files. Because that's so many more files to be infected/impersonated by malware. Because I love to delete! (Oh, did I say that last one out loud?)

On XP, the search was fast.
ON Win 7, the "better" search is agonizingly slow AND can't find what I know is there. How is this improved search?

And I've only been at this a few weeks! More crap to come, I sure!