Current Ramblings
Saturday, January 08, 2005
NEMESIS STEREO.
Unable to bear the sound of my own thoughts any longer, I set out today to replace my car stereo. I was partial to the one I lost, JVC's KD-G200, and Best Buy still had it listed on their web site, so I started there. They still had it on display, but the closest store that actually had one they could sell me was in Dayton. The guy there suggested I try H. H. Gregg, which is a local-ish chainabout on par with Circuit City. They didn't have the exact same model, either. What they had - and what I ended up buying - was the KD-AR200. I have dubbed this striking and clearly evil mechanism...Nemesis Stereo. It's almost exactly the same stereo, but significantly...more black. (Aside to my non-Transfan readers: A few years ago Takara started this thing with making evil black versions of Optimus Prime. The first one was dubbed Scourge in the US, but subsequent ones have had the somewhat more descriptive moniker of Nemesis Prime.) It's also part of this "Arsenal" subline that I don't quite understand. Graham pointed out that JVC is a major sponsor of Britian's Arsenal soccer team, but nothing on the site suggests a relationship with that. So who knows. I like it, though, because it doesn't stand out so much from the rest of my rather subdued center console. And it was on sale for $20 less than the first one.
And I am proud to say that I rejected paying $60 for installation and installed it my own damn self, despite the old man who rang me out asking if I was going to get "a friend" to install it. I really, really hate shopping for anything vaguely technical because of that sort of crap. I just won't even go in Radio Shack anymore. Yes, it was a big project of a kind I hadn't undertaken before, and I really didn't quite entirely know what I was doing, but that didn't mean I was going to just go whining to some man to take care of it for me. I hit a couple stores, found what I needed, discovered it was going to be much more complicated than I realized...and then I got in there and figured it out. I hadn't appreciated that you got a plug with the stereo with wires coming out of it, and a seperate set of connectors with wires coming out of them for the car, and then had to match all the wires up and splice them together yourself. But I managed without any help, and now everything works exactly like it's supposed to. I was actually impressed by how unpatronizing the guy I talked to at Wal-Mart about splicing stuff was after dealing with the guy at H. H. Gregg. Maybe he was just more used to women who were willing to get their hands dirty.
On the subject of shinies, I came to the conclusion in class on Wednesday night that it wouldn't hurt to invest in a flash drive for my computer class files. I had intended to spend around $20 and I was hoping to find a 64mb one for that. I was using my parents' credit card since it was for school, but I didn't want to spend more than I would if it was my own money to buy something fancier than I needed. But while the best Target had was a pair of 32mb ones for $28, Staples had one of those compound sales where sale + rebate = sick discount. So for what will be a mere $20 when the $10 rebates arrives, I got a super-slick 256mb SanDisk Cruzer Micro. I don't know what I'll do with all that space, but now I have all the files I need for this quarter safely on my hard drive. I'll want to use the school computers to print, since we only pull the printer out here on an as-absolutely-necessary basis, so at least I won't have to worry about smashing floppy disks in my backpack. And the blue LED is beautiful.
posted@12:47 AM by:Trixter: 0 comments