Category: Other

I’ve been busy packing the past couple of weeks. We are lucky in that we have the opportunity to pack and move well in advance. So we are taking the time to organize and go through all our crap.

Crap it is. Besides beds and clothes everything now is in boxes or piles. One for yard sale. One for stuff we’ll keep. The stuff we’ll keep we’ve been going through and tossing away.

It’s amazing how much crap we collect. We have a full box of magic markers and a full box of crayons. We found something like 10 pairs of scissors. Tons of little happy meal and bubble gum machine toys.

The whole thing has made me wonder if we as humans aren’t going about it all wrong. Why do we even have closets? We are wasting a few feet of wall to toss up doors that make it harder to get to our stuff. We hide our stuff in little rooms. We put it in storage.

Closets are just silly. If you came over to my house and noticed an attractive shelving system, nicely organized instead of a closet you’d probably be more impressed.

Lots of silly stuff though. Like it’s amazing how much crap we have for decoration. We have so much of it it isn’t very decorative. We have a half dozen little children’s toys that didn’t work as advertised, and a half dozen adult toys that are the same. Apparently we are addicted to stuffed animals. All of us gave up bags of them.

Old clothes are always going to happen. But did we really need six pairs of winter gloves for the kid? Do I need 32 pairs of socks?

Probably 200 pencils with 100 pens, three scientific calculators and a half dozen pencil sharpeners another half dozen headphones.

I’ve collected tons of computer junk too. Two dozen power cables. A few hundred feet of Ethernet and Coaxial cable. Countless boards and chips.

Yard sale, yard sale. We are having a big one. What doesn’t sell that I know will goes to E-bay. The rest to the local freecycle community. Anything left over to the salvation army. As I’m looking around there is more that needs to sell. You see I plan on using the yard sale money to upgrade. Maybe we should sell all our ratty towels.

I need to get new ones if I’m gonna display them out in the open one day.

Recently the kid had a project to do which involved some family photos. Rather then give up our precious photos we scanned them in and went to print them out only to remember we didn’t have any printer ink.

So off to walmart.com I went. We had five scanned images to print, along with two that were taken with our digital camera.

The first thing I had to do was somehow get the images to walmart. At the store they have a kiosk which accepts all sorts of formats, some of which I’d barely heard before. It accepted the xD cards my camera uses, along with CD’s and DVD’s. I’m not sure if I saw a USB port or floppy drive, but the device seriously had about a dozen recepticles for dongles.

This option is obviously for the more active and mobile members of the species. I opted to just sit at home and visit Walmart’s photocenter.

I filled out the form to sign up for their service and was immediately gifted with ten free prints. Shortly I was uploading the photos and a few clicks later they were on their way.

The webpage was quite easy to use and didn’t hiccup once. You can order prints in multiple sizes and quantities. Prints can be sent to your nearest store in one hour for a bit more, or mailed to you for a bit less. We opted in this case for the one hour in store pickup, after all walmart was footing the bill.

We did end up having some problems, apparently the computer in charge of recieving my photos at our local store was down the night I sent the pictures, I had to resend the next day after recieving a phone call from them. This also caused a bit of confusion at the register because I had two orders up there. In the end it was all figured out and all I lost was a bit of time.

The pictures came out very good. There was no visable difference between the scanned copies and the originals. The pictures taken on the digital camera were sharp and clear and honestly a bit better then the film pictures.

One picture was oddly resized due to my overzealous photoshopping beforehand. Your picture will be blown up to 4×6 if that is what you ordered. I should have adjusted the picture accordingly.

Overall I’m quite happy and of course can’t complain a bit about the price. But since they are only twelve cents for a 4×6 home delivery I will definitely be buying again.

And I don’t think I’ll ever touch a film camera again. Film is dead, long live digital.