After a trip to Fry’s Electronics today, my new system is finally complete. I had to buy a PS/2 to USB adapter for my wireless mouse/keyboard combo as well as an adapter (serial port to USB) to hook up my laser printer. Of course it turns out that second cable was unnecessary as my printer has a USB port and that was the only way I could get Vista to recognize it anyway. I spent a good two hours screwing around with the printer and drivers and all I needed to do was connect it with the USB port I didn’t realize it had until I started looking at the setup manual on the manufacturer’s website. I feel like an idiot, but at least I eventually figured it out.
I also bought new speakers to replace the ugly beige set I owned. I’m pleasantly surprised with their sound quality considering the price ($20 after $10 mail-in rebate). I’m not entirely surprised, though – I’ve always loved Creative’s products; my sound card is made by them too. There are only two brands I’ll even consider when it comes to speakers – Creative or Logitech. In fact, I have a cheaper set of Creative speakers at work (also purchased at Fry’s two years ago) and Joe has a Logitech set on his LCD (I got for him last Christmas) for gaming.
The girl got her iPod Nano case at Fry’s too. I’m not sure whether it had anything to do with me, or mere coincidence, but she bought the same case I own for my iPod. I showed it to her last night, so she knew it too. Hmmm.
We went to Red Robin for lunch. We don’t go their often and I really enjoy their food, even if I always get the same thing (Ensanda chicken platter).
Later while I was getting dinner ready we played the new Monopoly Electronic Banking Edition. I’ve never been a fan of Monopoly, but I don’t hate this version nearly as much as the original, even if they seem to think The Cubs are the true Chicago baseball team (suck it). We decided on a time to end the game because I swear we would have been there all night! Oh and I lost! I came in dead last with 7.5 mil or something. Blah.
I made chocolate chip cookies for dessert which came out nice and soft. Then I battled the damn printer for over an hour. But all is good now!
Also earlier I downloaded some free software – OpenOffice since I don’t own Office 2007 and don’t want to pay $150 to view/edit Excel files and MediaMonkey because I’m still looking for the best ripping/encoding software. I have yet to find one application that does everything how I want it to. Winamp crashes after I transfer music to my iPod (if it’s not connected, it never crashes), iTunes won’t name the files in the manner I want, Yahoo! Jukebox doesn’t like some of the CDs I own and refused to rip them, and MusicMatch wants you to pay $30+ a year to use their service. Ugh. MediaMonkey is ok for ripping tracks but the interface leaves something to be desired. It also uses Amazon.com for looking up album art instead of Gracenote. One of these days I will find the holy grail.
Oh and speaking of album art… for some reason the girl’s nano won’t display album art, even if it’s encoded in the file, unless the file is transferred to her iPod via iTunes. I don’t seem to have that problem (for the most part), so I’m perplexed. I tried it with several songs and the only way to get her nano to display the album cover was to delete the file and re-transfer it using iTunes. What a PITA.