Rants and Rambles with James Billings

MN, Best Buy, and rain

April 24th, 2008 | general

I tend to find myself driving to the Twin Cities to drop people off at the airport rather frequently. Today was one of those days. It rained the entire day, a big downpour many times throughout.

After my airport duty I walked around the Mall of America. Yes I’m still looking at computers so I had to check out the Apple store to play with a MacBook Pro. I recently saw a demo of the new things the mouse pad can do; I even remembered a few off the top of my head, so I tried them. Fun! I also saw the Macbook (Nike) Air. Wow, that is one skinny computer. I felt like I would crack it just by typing hard.

After the mall the next destination was Guitar Center off of France Ave. By this time it was 5pm…rush hour with downpouring rain. Mall of America is right off 494 exit 2. France Ave. is exit 7 off 494…so I had to travel 5 miles. That was the longest 5 miles ever, for what turned out to be a waste. G.C. is pretty much a disappointment these days (I used to love that store).

Next stop was driving back east on 494 to Best Buy off Lyndale Ave., which is about 3 or 4 miles from the France Ave. exit. This took even longer. It’s always a good feeling when you’re listening to KDWB and they have the traffic report on only to mention that “494 east is the slowest moving part of the city. But once you pass Lyndale you should be fine”. Ugh. It was slow enough that I was able to eat a bag of cookies and the leftover pieces of pizza I had.

I went to Best Buy for 3 things: Paramore CD, Flight of the Conchords CD, and look at the Dell XPS 1530. Upon walking in the store I saw a Fender USA made Stratocaster and a Gibson Les Paul with a Line 6 halfstack…more on that later. I found the CDs so off to the computer dept I went. After looking at a few Gateways and an Asus I found the Dell section and tada…an XPS 1530. One problem: it didn’t work. the 1530 comes in numerous screen resolutions so I asked an employee what screen resolution this one was, since I couldn’t get ‘properties’ to come up. He couldn’t make it work either and restarted it. And then he restarted it again…until he finally said they were having problems with the Dells crashing over and over. hmmmm.

I played with a Dell Inspiron since the XPS was dead. I noticed the mouse trackpad was jumpy and nearly impossible to control. I then tried an HP…same thing. I then tried Toshiba and a Gateway…all the trackpads were difficult to control. I have two theories: either vista uses so much power it causes it, or the program loaded by Best Buy for their in store demos is using heaps of power (the employee trying to fix the 1530 said the Best Buy demo program took forever to load and start). I do think something was wrong because every single computer, all different brands running Vista at Best Buy were hard to control. Of all the computers I played with today I liked the MacBook Pro the best.

After the computers I walked around the store wondering where those guitars and the amp came from. I found a special “instruments” section in the far back left of the store. These aren’t the normal $80 guitars for kids. This was a full music shop with it’s own cash register and guitar strings behind the counter, and an entire room with a sealed door for acoustic guitars, plus a couple drumsets and keyboards! They carry a full line of BOSS effects and have many top level Gibsons and Fenders…SGs, Les Pauls, American Strats and Teles, even the Eric Johnson Strat. To be honest I was amazed. It was like a mini-sized Guitar Center.

Anyways, the drive home was awful due to huge amounts of rain. I don’t normally mind rain, but it slowed me up enough that I missed the beginning of LOST. booo…

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