Articles/Editorials, Vinyl 33

Beatles Abbey Road

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The next album I have in this little series for you is Abbey Road from the Beatles of course.. This one is a bit special actually in that it’s from the Apple Corps label and it’s sort of a first pressing so it’s kind of worth some money..  There are several versions of this album out there, the most valuable album is one that looks just like this one, but the Apple on the back is misaligned and the words ‘for her majesty’ are missing from the label, depending on condition it can fetch well over $1000. The one I have is a 2nd first printing or pressing essentially, the Apple on the album  is aligned correctly but the words ‘for her majesty’ are still missing from the record label. All others after that are ‘fixed’ as it were… So the one I have, I can easily get a few hundred dollars for… not bad..

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Articles/Editorials, Vinyl 33

Beatles Magical Mystery Tour

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So, as you may know my Mom died this past February, and since my brother is in another state it basically falls to me to ‘clean’ the house out. It’s a good thing really, most of the stuff is mine really, or the older stuff is anyway. Going through things over the past month or so I found things that I had totally forgotten about, one of those is my record collection and my mom’s record collection. Yes I’m old enough to have had a record player and enjoyed them… So I figure why not do a little series of pictures of albums, these are originals, some over 50 years old..

I figured I’d start it off with probably one of my favorite Beatles albums Magical Mystery Tour, then again I like most all Beatles stuff really.

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What made this album cool was the book insert in the center, and of course the music…

Articles/Editorials, Rants!

Rough week and returning something to Costco

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Been a rough year really with everything going on..

but this past weekend, on Sunday, my kids went to turn on my Wii to play it and it didn’t come on, I just bought it on the 30th of March.. got it replaced no problem but still, not even a month old and it died. Of course I lost all of my game info, so everything I did up to that point was lost so now I’ll have to re-play all of the games, which isn’t a bad thing I guess, but some of them I finished already and had many things unlocked

Then my new 47" LCD HDTV decided to start going as well, got that the 20th of March… all the black went a pixellated green color, it was a Vizio brand, and after doing some research I found this to be a common problem with that model… so back to Costco I went, and of course they stopped carrying that model, and the only one in the same price range was a 46" model, but it would be stupid for me to get a smaller one since I’ve already got a 47" screen protector. I was talking to the customer service rep at the returns and he said maybe I could talk to the manager and try and get a discount on another 47", there was about a $400 difference between the one I got and the one they had in stock. The manager ended up giving me a $100 discount on the new TV since they couldn’t replace mine with the same model. It’s another Vizio, but it’s the newer model, the 120hz version with three speakers built-in, and motion smoothing or whatever they call it along with some other odd named features..

I don’t know, it was the first thing I ever bought at Costco and I’m not too happy that I had to return it a little over a month after getting it, and honestly they weren’t very helpful about getting a new one for me. They kept trying to sell me the smaller one even after I explained to them that I had the 47" screen protector already. I guess $100 discount is better than no discount though…

One observation was that the manager just didn’t seem that willing to even help me out at all, I guess he didn’t really have to help me, but you’d think since it was my first purchase with them, and I had to return it they might be a little more willing to help me out. The manager was trying to say he couldn’t give me any discount since it was a newer technology, which I don’t understand what that had to do with it at all, I bought the TV from them in good faith, and it didn’t work, I was out of a TV and they didn’t have a replacement for it, I would have been happy to get the exact model as a replacement honestly..

oh well, live and learn I guess

Articles/Editorials

Life sucks still…

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Well my Mom died in February, now my Grandma died last night…

I was going down to see here this morning, but I guess that’s pointless now.

She was 86, and she hasn’t been doing well, and things got worse when my Mom died.

She was in the hospital actually when Mom died, and she just got out about two weeks ago, doctors told us basically he was sending her home to die in peace, that’s what she wanted really, she hated hospitals. They told us she had anywhere from two weeks to two months, but she wasn’t happy, and really she was ready to die..

oh well, it’s turning out to be a rather bad year for me so far….

Articles/Editorials, Freelancing/Reviewing

An update…

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Been a while since I’ve updated anything here huh?

Oh well, I’m just way too busy, my capture card died for capturing videos from game consoles, ordered another one but it was DOA, so I had to get it replaced, and of course more games kept coming in for review, I’m like way backed up on console games now..but I spent all day this past Saturday and Sunday just playing games and capturing videos from them for the Wii and Xbox360.

This past Christmas I bought my kids these cheapie little digital cameras, no LCD on the or anything like that, but they liked them quite a bit, but there was recently a Woot Off where they had little Disney 3mp digital camera for $12, so I bought them those ones, they’re not bad, they’re got the LCD on them, expandable with SD cards etc. They’re not bad, especially for the price, and considering they’re for kids they work fine really. It was funny, the other day they were pretending to be product reviewers, I just had to laugh, they think my job is so wonderful, especially the part about playing games… oh well

also I was asked to be a guest blogger or reviewer over on Connect Reviews which was rather cool, I reviewed a cute and yet disturbing Teddy Bear USB Drive.. review is HERE

We’re expanding a bit over at TestFreaks, I put an ad up on CraigsList looking for writers and surprisingly I got quite a few responses to it, one of the caveats in the ad was that I was also looking for female writers to get a female perspective, and I got quite a few who responded, so things are progressing along nicely with that.