Category: Life

We spent part of last Sunday browsing at the Barnes & Noble in Arlington. I’ve always liked hanging out in bookstores. There was a nice little Starbucks cafe. A few people were sitting around reading or surfing the web. Sadly, they all had either Dell or HP laptops, no PowerBooks.

I skipped the coffee and headed straight for the computer books. They had a great selection of programming books. And as I said the other day, I’m really getting back into programming lately so I wanted to pick up a good book.

Here are a few that I was really interested in: Pragmatic Version Control with Subversion, Joel on Software, Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X (2nd Edition), and Foundations of Ajax.

These books ranged in price from $19.99 to $44.99. I always have a hard time deciding what to buy so I asked Paige to give me a number between 20 and 45. She said 32 so I went with Pragmatic Version Control with Subversion for $32.27 after tax. So far this has been a great choice.

So what’s the point of all of this, besided being a look inside my crazy thought processes? Well, now I’m going to tell you why brick-and-mortar bookstores are going out of business. You see, I wasn’t there for the coffee or the free WiFi. I wasn’t there to mingle with the other patrons or to hang out and waste an afternoon. I was there for one thing – a book.

Unfortunately, nothing about the Barnes & Noble experience assisted me in choosing a programming book. I can assure you that none of the employees had read any of those books. Assuming anyone was even working the floor that day. The only people I saw were standing behind the cash registers. There were a few other customers wandering around, but most of them were checking out the “for Dummies” books.

Now we come to the most important part of any shopping experience, the price. It wasn’t until we got home Sunday evening that I realized just how much of a premium I had paid for the Barnes & Noble experience. I paid $29.95 plus tax for the book. Amazon.com sells the same book for $19.77 with no tax. So I overpaid by $12.50. That’s over 30%. With that kind of markup, I could buy books from Amazon and open up my own bookstore.

I realize this is turning into quite a rant, and I don’t want anyone to get the wrong idea. I’ll still stop in at every bookstore I can and check out the selection, but if they hope to stay in business something is going to have to change.

Some people will say they like to thumb through a book before they buy, you can look inside most books at Amazon. And to me that’s actually one of the downsides of buying a book at the bookstore, other people have already handled it. Lots of times the covers are scuffed and some of the pages are folded just from being picked up and put back down.

I understand that Amazon buys in bulk and smaller bookstores can’t compete on price, but Barnes & Noble is not exactly a mom and pop kind of place. They should be able to at least come close – 10% off the retail price on every book would be a good start. Or how about a free drink from Starbucks with every purchase. They’re already selling $0.50 cups of coffee for $5.00 so I don’t think they’ll miss giving away a few.

After price, they need to work on service. I had to stand in line while the cashier tried to sell the discount club to the guy in front of me just so I could then step up and have him give me the same speech. Amazon doesn’t charge anything for their discounts. If I wanted cheaper books I would just buy online. The cashier’s goal in life should be to handle my transaction as quickly and courteously as possible and then move on to the next customer.

Also, why don’t they even try to compete with technology? Give away the discount cards for free like the grocery stores, and keep a database of everything I buy. Then they could easily recommend books based on my past purchases like Amazon does. Also, put a few terminals with barcode readers around the store. Then I could just scan the barcode on the book in my hand and get the rating and reviews for it. At least put a free bookmark in every bag.

The point is – if I’m going to pay more, I expect to get more. That seems reasonable to me. I think next time I’ll just hang out in the cafe, drink a Frappucino, and order my book online using their free WiFi…

I’ve decided to fill the trunk of my car with ashes.

That way when the leathery-faced old smoker in the car in front of me flicks ashes out their window onto my car I can simply pass them and pull the trunk release.

Now, does anyone know where I can pick up 11.5 cubic feet of ashes?

Here are a few of the pictures from the Festival of Pumpkins:

Mommy and Matthew are all smiles.

That’s Matthew sitting on his first bale of hay.

We don’t look very happy because the sun was in our eyes.

Matthew was not so sure about Sparky the fire dog. There was another fireman standing back with a remote control and a microphone talking through Sparky.

Matthew tried to make friends with some llamas. Unfortunately, they didn’t know the llama song.

There were quite a few classic cars there. Is this Geoff’s dad’s car?

Matthew couldn’t quite reach the pedals. If you look close on the right side of this picture you can just barely see Paige’s hand on top of a mailbox. Luckily Matthew was pretty interested in the tractor and didn’t try to jump off.

Overall we had a really good time. We ate a hot dog, some kettle corn, and a fried pie. It should be even more fun next year when Matthew is big enough to run around and get into things.

We’ll probably also enter him in the costume contest next year. We didn’t know about it until we got there and we were too late. Check back tomorrow for a few trick or treat pictures.

Boo!

I think I’m feeling the benefits of the end of daylight savings time today. We had a really busy weekend, but I’m not at all tired today. I’ve been tired for so long, I had just about forgotten what this feeling was like.

Also, now that robotics is over I have some more free time in the evenings. I’m planning on spending a lot of time writing code for the next few weeks (months, years, etc.) Hopefully my geeky ramblings won’t spill over onto this site, but don’t hold your breath.

Check back later for pictures from the Pumpkin Festival. We had a good time there Saturday morning. Matthew was too little to do most of the things, but he did get to see his first llama.

I complained the other day about Serenity not coming to Paris so I guess I should mention the fact that it is playing this week. We watched most of it on Tuesday evening, but unfortunately we had to leave a little early.

I was hoping to go back and catch the rest of it this weekend, but of course the Cinemark in Paris has failed me again. Today is the last day to see Serenity. That’s right, it started last Friday and it’ll be gone tomorrow.

Since we’ve already paid for tickets I feel totally justified in downloading a copy to watch. After all, we purchased the rights to watch the whole movie. I even bought a $3.00 bag of stale popcorn.

There’s good news and bad news… The good news is I don’t have to stay up at the school until 6:00pm every night anymore. The bad news is we didn’t do so well on game day. As a matter of fact, we didn’t even place.

We came in 8th place on the field again this year. We made it to the semi-finals thanks to our performance in the wild card match just like before. Last year we came out in 3rd place for the BEST Award, this year we got nothing.

I honestly don’t know exactly how we did, since they only announce scores for the teams that place. I’ll have to try to e-mail somebody at BEST and see if we can get our score.

We may not have won a trophy, but no one can deny that we had spirit:

Oh well, we’ll try a little harder next year…

Here’s a tip for movie theater owners: If you’re concerned about people downloading movies instead of paying to see them, why don’t you try actually showing the movies that people want to see?

Everyone I know would gladly pay to see Serenity. I would probably see it more than once. Unfortunately, that’s not an option in Paris.

Oh well, I’m sure I’ll find some way to watch it…

Here’s Matthew with his first pumpkin.

Paige bought this kit that you stick on a real pumpkin like Mr. Potato Head. It’s a lot less messy than trying to carve the pumpkin.

Not to mention I’m no artist.

In my younger days, I loved to burn things. I remember hanging out at the Foster house and trying to find anything we could set on fire. Everyone had bad hair and smelly armpits because we burned up all of the hair spray and Right Guard.

I’ll bet there are still marks on their back porch were we would make puddles of whatever we could find in the kitchen and try to set them on fire. But we were never stupid enough to fill a melon with something flamable and then try to hit it with a bat…

Fire Melon

This is one of those things that makes the Internet so great. If you’ve ever wondered – “What would happen if I set a melon on fire and hit it with a bat?” Now you know.

I thought I would at least post something here so people would know I’m still alive. Our social calendar has been pretty full lately and I’ve been working at least 50 hours a week now that robotics is going again. Hopefully I’ll find some time for a proper update about what’s been going on lately in the near future.

That last sentence is a real beauty. I obviously type much faster than I think. It kinda sounds like I’m saying “tomorrow I’ll predict the future…”