Saturday, May 05, 2007

A place like The Mandolin.

I hate Starbucks. In MN, we have Caribou Coffee, which is pretty much the same thing. It's not anything specific to Starbucks that I dislike. It's the trend of mass produced individuality. I like places like The Mandolin in Tacoma, WA. The Mandolin is genuinely cool. There are real coffee shops all over the country. But out of ignorance, people go to Starbucks and similar places that attempt to mimic the individuality of a real coffee house.

The Mandolin has live music, a book club, and other community activities. It's a really cool place to hang out.

I need to find a place like that in the Twin Cities. I'm sure they exist. I just have to find them. A place with live music would be best.

Stupid CompUSA

Sarah wanted me to build her a computer. We've been talking about this for a while now. She has an old one from which we will salvage as much as possible.

We were going to build one in PA when we got together at Rob's wedding. But it didn't happen for various reasons.

I'm now working in Minneapolis, so I said I could see about taking a day off to head up to Duluth where she lives. Today is Saturday - as good a day to take off as any. I figure I'll head over to CompUSA, pick up a motherboard, processor, RAM, and whatever else the budget will allow. I took my time and arrived at CompUSA at around 5 pm only to find out that they're closing the store (I guess they're closing all Minnesota locations). They're having a huge clearance sale, but all the good stuff is already gone. They had one processor, a small selection of RAM, and no motherboards whatsoever.

I bought the processor, a stick of RAM, and a copy of Windows Vista Home Premium.

I should have just stole Vista, but I think Sarah wants a legit license and all that.

The processor I could have got for the same price on the irrnet. The RAM was over priced even with the clearance sale discount and after doing some mo-bo shopping, I don't think they make a motherboard that will use the DDR RAM with the Athlon socket AM2 processor. That's OK though. I can stick the ram in my desktop and get some DDR2 for Sarah.

Now we just need to get a motherboard (and RAM - get 'em at the same time), but all the stores that sell motherboards close at 5 on Saturday. I think I'll just have her order it and call me to come put it all together when it gets there.