Tone Parsons

The obligatory post of the week

It’s been a while since I’ve posted anything. Sorry about that, but I’ve been kind of busy (which is nice for a change!!)

Last Friday, my old boss and his boss (aka: Mike and Paul) took me out for dinner. We went to the Bluz at the Bend here in Spokane for prime rib and beer. The prime was amazing… over an inch thick and tender as hell, and they serve good beer there (I had Crystal Bitters… nummy!!). After that, Paul came back to my place for a beer and we sat and talked for a couple of hours.

On Saturday, we went to go see the Spokane Shock kick the Boise Burn’s butt at the arena. I had an extra ticket so I invited Paul along (he’d never been to an arena football game before). Good times were had, and once again, Paul came over to my place for beers after the game. He also told me that he wanted me to go out to work for one last lunch on Tuesday… so I did.

What I didn’t know is that they had booked a conference room for lunch and had it catered. They called in all the people I had worked with when I was the Senior Web Developer there to give me a send off.

*sniff*

I feel loved! 🙂

I did talk to HR while I was there, and they said the same thing that Paul and Mike had already told me: if I’m ever able to come back to work, they’ll take me in a heartbeat.

I’ve been concerned about that, as I wasn’t exactly able to give much notice when I went out on disability. Of course, it wasn’t like it was a surprise to anyone. I’d been fighting it for years, and they had watched me slowly fall to the side. It’s good to know that they still like me.

Other things: On Monday, May 5th, my wife and I celebrated our 18th wedding anniversary. We decided to go in together and just buy one gift for both of us… and it’s a thing of beauty: a Samsung LN46A750 LCD TV.

The Samsung LN-46A750... It's amazing!!

OMG…. I love this thing!!! It runs at 120Hz and has a 4ms refresh rate! Sadly, it’s native resolution is higher than Comcast provides, but it still looks amazing! It has 4 HDMI 1.3, a ton of RCA inputs, and even an ethernet port, so I can hook it to the network and pull images and MP3’s off of my pc and play them.

Just wow!

It was regularly $3,199.99 but BestBuy (aka: Those Fuckers) had it on sale for $2,799.99. Of course, I found it for cheaper on the web at OneCall.com for $2,299.99, and made BestBuy match the price (they soooo didn’t want to!). They tried to get me to buy an extended warranty or at least some HDMI cables from them, but I politely said no (I never buy extended warranties, and they wanted $70 for the same HDMI cable I can get for $12.99 online).

I guess the moral of the story on that is: do your research BEFORE you go to the store.

That’s it for now… perhaps next time I’ll do a video blog again.

3 comments

3 Comments so far

  1. Eddie May 16th, 2008 1:22 pm

    Hey, sorry I didn’t make it out on Friday for beers, I really wanted to. And as for lunch, I didn’t get an invite 🙂
    Glad they did all that for you. Also, I got a brochure I need to get to you, so maybe I’ll stop by this weekend. I’ll give you a call. Congrats on the TV, even if you did buy it from “those fuckers”.

  2. Moe Flam May 19th, 2008 3:28 pm

    It was good to see you back at the ranch. You were/ are a credit to the whole deptartment. Sorry to see you go, look forward to working with you again.

    Double nice on the TV… BB gets what they deservce and you get a great picture.

  3. miftah May 23rd, 2008 4:09 pm

    I have the LN-T4661F. Per good tech sense, I today performed a firmware upgrade, only to have the picture go all sorts of psychedelic colored. I called Samsung and they told me that you should never upgrade firmware unless you’re told specifically to by a tech. I thought that was funny, accepted the service ticket they gave me, and went about finding my own solution. Since its now Friday after 5, I know what would have happened otherwise. Luckily I found where to hack the TV and corrected the mis-written line of code in the firmware upgrade. Just, you know, FYI. Wait til a minimum wage tech tells you its okay to upgrade your firmware. Or Samsung will fuck up your TV.