Tag Archives: Wal-Mart

This week in Dan 3/20

  By Big Dan | March 20, 2011 - 10:47 pm |
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This week was pretty good except for our car dying. Of course I’m not happy about that especially since we just spent $100 on supposedly fixing it. It was the head gasket and off to the junk yard the Flinstonemobile went. We got $100 from the guy who came to pick it up.  That at least pays for the repairs so it’s not a total slap in the face. Although it would’ve been nice to keep it in our pocket.

With the car dead I’m looking to do as much food shopping online as I can. So far I found Amazon has somewhat decent prices on dry goods. Wal-Mart has better prices on some dry goods than their stores do. Since the grocery store across the street is so ridiculously expensive, I’ll be trying to get as much as possible online. NetGrocer looks pretty good but a buddy warned me that it can take a week sometimes more for anything to actually ship. :eek:

On St. Pat’s day I hung out with my neighbor and fried up a big batch of chicken. He had a 10lb bag stuffed in his freezer for the longest time. He didn’t know what to do with it so I offered to fry it up for him. It was my first time frying whole pieces of chicken with a flour breading. I’m used to doing chicken Italian style (cutlets and bread crumbs). The seasoning wasn’t as flavorful as it could’ve been but for a first time I think I did pretty damn good. I also whipped up some rice and beans. We ate like kings. I stopped by today and he still has a huge plate in of chicken in the fridge.

While I was cooking we caught a couple movies on Netflix. I love that my Roku box catches my Wifi down there. We always catch the newscast then check out some movies. Half the times we wind up BSing through most of the movie and have no clue what’s going on in the movie, lol.

While the fried chicken was bad for my diet, I’ve been doing great on my exercise as outlined here. Not the best on my diet but better than last week. This week I will quit smoking.

I’ll probably be folding in my diet blog to here. This is my personal blog and my diet is personal. No point in maintaining two separate WordPress installs.

How was everyone else’s week?

Finally a new Desk

  By Big Dan | March 4, 2011 - 12:29 pm |
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Last Friday FedEx dropped off my new desk. It was a good deal $130 shipped to my door and I didn’t have to bother with dragging it out of the store, into the car, and up the stairs into the house. The desk is a lot bigger than it looks on Wal-Mart’s site. Of course at that price it’s pressed wood and not the best quality but I don’t beat up my furniture anyhow. It came with a chip on the edge so I emailed customer service and received a 10% discount. Good enough for me. :)

Getting it assembled was a major pain in the ass. Every time I buy together furniture I swear it off, lol. All told it took me 9 hours to set it up, that includes plenty of smoke breaks, breaking down my old desks, and getting everything wired in. Anywho here she is:

new desk

It’s so nice to have shelves to place stuff on instead of everything just laid out on the table. Now everything has it’s place and I even have a completely empty shelf though I’m sure I’ll find something to stuff in there.

Yesterday my new rolling chair arrived. It’s nice but a little to small to sit comfortably for more than an hour or so. That’s good in a sense as it forces me to get up and stretch.

I’ve been looking for a couple of filing cabinets nothing fancy. I used to have a metal 2-draw filing cabinet, which was only $20. Now the same cabinet is $60. That’s just plain nuts. I may just look for a plastic one if that’s the case.

I’m a big fan of seeing other people’s work spaces and flows and always borrow ideas. I follow the Life Hacker show and tell pool unfortunately a lot of it is the Mac fan boys posting melodramatic shots of the same iMac/Mac Book Pro we’ve all seen a thousand times.

Magic Jack Full Review

  By Big Dan | December 7, 2010 - 11:57 am |
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Magic Jack Review A couple months ago I wrote about the Magic Jack I bought and promised a full review. We’ve been using the Magic Jack as our only home phone for just over 2 months and it’s been great. Magic Jack just works. The only draw back is your computer has to be on in order to make and receive calls. I have a little Mac Mini sitting on my desk always on and handles the Magic Jack among other things.

Once you plug in your Magic Jack, the Magic Jack app launches and self updates. You login with your Magic Jack account and your 911 address shows up within the app. If you take your Magic Jack out and about you can add a new 911 address right from the app. Once added  whichever address you’re at can be selected from a drop down within the app which is pretty neat and less hassle than other VOIP providers. The software itself is pretty decent no complaints there. One of the nicest features is your call logs and contacts are uploaded to Magic Jack’s servers. When you unplug the Magic Jack and put on a different computer all your information is right there once you log in.

The contact’s list is very basic but gets the job done. I’d like to see it integrate with the system or email client’s address book in the future but that’s doubtful as it’s cross platform. A way to import contacts would be ultra helpful though.

Magic Jack’s feature set is pretty standard fare:

  • Voicemail
  • Caller ID
  • Call Waiting
  • Call Forwarding
  • Soft phone – The ability to use your computer’s speakers and microphone as the phone when the Magic Jack is connected.

Everything works as expected. Voicemail is a little strange though in that it emails me a wav file of the voice mail after it’s recorded. Magic Jack then deletes the voicemail after emailing me the file though so you cannot call in and listen to it. Not a great idea for shared (household) phones.  To workaround this I’ve set our answering machine to pick up after 3 rings thus avoiding voicemail pickup. Call forwarding is great a couple of times I’ve forwarded calls to my cell when we were all out and about and it worked as expected.

I don’t recommend the Magic Jack as a home phone replacement unless you have other phones available (like a cell phone) in your house. The only reason is emergencies. You don’t want to need the police or an ambulance and not be able to call 911 because your computer crashed or internet/electricity is out. My sister and I both have a cell phone in the event of an emergency I would probably pick up that first anyhow.

I highly recommend the Magic Jack as a second line for a teenager or business. It’s also helpful if your cell phone has capped voice minutes. You can use the Magic Jack whenever you’re home or near an internet connection with your laptop. Magic Jack + Google Voice = Win all around

I’d like to see more portability out of Magic Jack in the future. You shouldn’t have to plug in the Magic Jack to use the soft phone features. Portable (iOS and Android) apps would be nice to use it while on the go. Basically I’d like it to be more Skype-like minus the instant messaging and video.

The only issue I have with MJ is that if I switch user accounts on my Mac the Magic Jack disconnects and is unable to make or receive calls. I think it’s more of an OS X thing then Magic Jack. For this reason I have a separate non-administrator account just for the Magic Jack. A couple of times I’ve switched to work on my user account and forgot all about it which lead to some missed calls. No big deal but something to think about if you only have 1 computer and multiple people using it.

When I first decided to go with Magic Jack my local Wal-Mart didn’t have them in stock so I ordered from the MJ website. With the jack, first year of service, and shipping it was just shy of $50. Not a bad deal at all. I was out doing some Christmas shopping last week and seen a whole display of Magic Jacks at Walmart for $40. You just cannot beat that price for a while year’s phone service and it’s only $20 a year thereafter. For Christmas, I’m thinking about picking up one for a friend who never seems to be able to pay their phone bill yet always maintains an internet connection. I will more than likely replace my business line (currently with Skype @ $60/yr) with a Magic Jack. I rarely use it but  need to maintain a separate business line.

All in all two thumbs up from me for Magic Jack!