Hawk’s Babble-Log

Sometime this year, I got a call from Columbia House. I belong to their DVD club. I think it was a mistake. They asked me if I’d like to pre-order the new 007 James Bond movie and, if I did, I’d get a coupon for a FREE DVD! I thought it sounded like a pretty good deal, so I went for it.

Mistake. Yes, that was a mistake. I don’t know why I keep on falling for such things. Maybe one day I’ll learn.

Anyway, I got the new 007 movie and I got the coupon. So here I am now, looking to use this coupon and get my free DVD. Here’s a picture of it. I’ve rubbed out any numbers which may be significant and added a subtle red arrow pointing to the price. With this coupon, I can get any selection with a price of $21.95 or less.

Okay, that’s cool. Now let’s go check out the Columbia House website!

Notice how EVERYTHING is $22.95? Those sale prices in red only take effect when you first buy something at $22.95.

My nice little coupon here is friggin’ worthless! What can I buy with it? Nothing!

I’m going to cancel my Columbia House account just as soon as I can find a use for this goddamned coupon. Then I’ll just stick with amazon.com. They treat me right.

Here’s the new motherboard, RAM, video card and hard drive installed into the new case.

At this point, I still had the original heat sink and CPU fan. Later on, I swapped it out for a better one. More on that later.

It’s almost a new machine! I just need to add some power and I’ll be ready to boot it up for the first time. Also notice the position of the RAM; I started with it in the first two slots, the yellow ones. Later on, while I was debugging (what I thought was) a RAM problem, I moved ‘em over to the two red slots. More on that later.