2006-11-22 09:17![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
digitaldiscipline
digitaldiscipline... and as I typed that, the world blew up.
Be that as it may, this remix of Heaven's Earth rocks my box/socks/bagels and lox.
In any case, last night was my first foray into the official BzzAgent action. Along with Angelsil & El Uno, we hit the "snob mall" (International Plaza) in search of the Sony Store. Fortunately, Angel knew right where it was, so the mutual exposure of yuppies::me was kept to a relative minimum. Heh.
I had every intention of doing a Good Cop/Bad Cop routine with Angel (since she is a card carrying Sony Whore, and proud of it, whereas I don't trust any pc that doesn't have at least some of my skin and blood involved in its genesis). However, the tech guy seemed to have eyes only for me (why, I wonder?). I dunno if it was giving Sil the wrong impression, but I was keenly aware of the fact that it was "guy talking to guy" rather than "guy talking to everyone" most of the time.
After a rather surprising bit of stand-around waiting for our Vaio expert to shepherd us among the laptops, it was refreshing to see that, despite the Apple-ness of the store, they're not fundamentally bad hunks of equipment (shiny points were earned for both carbon-fiber construction and the extreme niftiness of a 1ghz windows-based ultra-portable the size of a thick paperback... as well as the gunmetal grey microfiber uniform shirts the employees get).
Our presenter knew his patter, and quickly pointed out the differences between the various models in their lineup despite a completely nonlinear and non-intuitive naming convention for their devices. I blame AMD & Intel for starting this idiocy with their processor ratings scheme after moving beyond the Pentium III generation of hardware (at least carmakers have a modicum of logic to theirs - LS430 = "luxury sedan, 4.3 liter engine" and so forth).
He also cleared up a misconception on my part, gleaned from reading their promotional material too quickly (you get trade-in value towards a new laptop by bringing them your old laptop, not any old PC... so my nascent scheme to find something more useful to do with the P3-800 in my office foundered on the rocks of reality); he also said that they're looking to do something similar with camcorders (already launched on the sonystyle web site, eventually to trickle down to their B&M locations).
Bob and I then talked about HDTV while Angel perused digital cameras after they'd made a purchase decision.
In a frightening bit of confluence, I had mentioned David Hasselhoff's music videos (this will be inflicted on them tomorrow at Casa Critus *muahahaha*) as we made our way in from the parking lot, and lo and behold, who was on all the big-screen tv's when we walk in, than the Hoff hizzownself, as Adam Sandler's boss in "Click," (which, naturally, I had to check out (it was in the promo loop for Blu-Ray) because of the gratuitous slo-mo shot of a delightfully stacked blonde jogging).
On the whole, I still don't see myself as a Vaio owner, but, as I told the Sony folks, this was about as close as I've come to wanting one since seeing the first Dell XPS; I don't want a toy. If I get a laptop, it'll be as a desktop replacement, and that's still a tall order as far as specs are concerned (not RAM/CPU these days, but until there's a TB of storage in one of them, I don't see myself making the jump, because I have too much crap stored on my main rig for easy migration... also, I don't care for the difficulty in upgrade path a laptop represents; I'd much rather have the ability to yank and replace devices as finances warrant, rather than dropping a used-Miata sized chunk of change on something I can only do minimal tweaking to down the road).
Be that as it may, this remix of Heaven's Earth rocks my box/socks/bagels and lox.
In any case, last night was my first foray into the official BzzAgent action. Along with Angelsil & El Uno, we hit the "snob mall" (International Plaza) in search of the Sony Store. Fortunately, Angel knew right where it was, so the mutual exposure of yuppies::me was kept to a relative minimum. Heh.
I had every intention of doing a Good Cop/Bad Cop routine with Angel (since she is a card carrying Sony Whore, and proud of it, whereas I don't trust any pc that doesn't have at least some of my skin and blood involved in its genesis). However, the tech guy seemed to have eyes only for me (why, I wonder?). I dunno if it was giving Sil the wrong impression, but I was keenly aware of the fact that it was "guy talking to guy" rather than "guy talking to everyone" most of the time.
After a rather surprising bit of stand-around waiting for our Vaio expert to shepherd us among the laptops, it was refreshing to see that, despite the Apple-ness of the store, they're not fundamentally bad hunks of equipment (shiny points were earned for both carbon-fiber construction and the extreme niftiness of a 1ghz windows-based ultra-portable the size of a thick paperback... as well as the gunmetal grey microfiber uniform shirts the employees get).
Our presenter knew his patter, and quickly pointed out the differences between the various models in their lineup despite a completely nonlinear and non-intuitive naming convention for their devices. I blame AMD & Intel for starting this idiocy with their processor ratings scheme after moving beyond the Pentium III generation of hardware (at least carmakers have a modicum of logic to theirs - LS430 = "luxury sedan, 4.3 liter engine" and so forth).
He also cleared up a misconception on my part, gleaned from reading their promotional material too quickly (you get trade-in value towards a new laptop by bringing them your old laptop, not any old PC... so my nascent scheme to find something more useful to do with the P3-800 in my office foundered on the rocks of reality); he also said that they're looking to do something similar with camcorders (already launched on the sonystyle web site, eventually to trickle down to their B&M locations).
Bob and I then talked about HDTV while Angel perused digital cameras after they'd made a purchase decision.
In a frightening bit of confluence, I had mentioned David Hasselhoff's music videos (this will be inflicted on them tomorrow at Casa Critus *muahahaha*) as we made our way in from the parking lot, and lo and behold, who was on all the big-screen tv's when we walk in, than the Hoff hizzownself, as Adam Sandler's boss in "Click," (which, naturally, I had to check out (it was in the promo loop for Blu-Ray) because of the gratuitous slo-mo shot of a delightfully stacked blonde jogging).
On the whole, I still don't see myself as a Vaio owner, but, as I told the Sony folks, this was about as close as I've come to wanting one since seeing the first Dell XPS; I don't want a toy. If I get a laptop, it'll be as a desktop replacement, and that's still a tall order as far as specs are concerned (not RAM/CPU these days, but until there's a TB of storage in one of them, I don't see myself making the jump, because I have too much crap stored on my main rig for easy migration... also, I don't care for the difficulty in upgrade path a laptop represents; I'd much rather have the ability to yank and replace devices as finances warrant, rather than dropping a used-Miata sized chunk of change on something I can only do minimal tweaking to down the road).
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I hatehatehate being treated like an idiot in electronics stores. Granted, I am not 100% techie, but I do work IN technology and do understand more than the basics, so having some moron in a button down shirt and a name tag talking down to me makes me want to kill.
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He didn't talk down to anyone (other than, yanno, being a foot taller than Sil *ducks*); he just seemed to focus on me almost exclusively, which, were I in her shoes, I'd have been kind of annoyed by.
Not a button-down shirt by any stretch - sort of a hypercontemporary windbreaker-like thing; had it not been so blatantly branded, I'd want one. Dark grey microfiber FTW.
And it did look nice on the girl at the concierge's desk, but that was probably also due to what it was wrapped around. *oink* ;-)
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On the downside, you *do* pay for it through the nose on those units. That coupled with the fact that you really can't upgrade notebooks (for the most part, unless you really know what you're doing) makes a notebook a tougher sell for me. At least the prices dropping like a rock makes getting a cheap $600 Dell justifiable.
As for you not trusting anything that doesn't have your input in it's genesis, I laugh. Loudly. Gratuitously. You seem to forget how many weekends were spent rebuilding that box that you kept shuffling back on forth from Coudersport, the smoking PSU and a number of failed/destroyed RMA products that you've had to send it.
If you like the 1GB ultraportable, go check out the QQQ.
Trade in: Go check and see what requirements they have in terms of components and functionality. I'm sure you could pick up a 486 laptop on ebay for little more than the cost of shipping if the trade value is worth it.
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If you have that much data, chances are that most of it probably doesn't belong on your main rig. Consider getting NAS. It's not as though you couldn't make your data remotely accessable from anyplace that has a connection.
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Their req's are a minimum of 1ghz cpu, so you can't just get $100 for a POS; that was included in the spiel. I had that thought myself.
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Oh, I'm not saying the Sony folks are guaranteed evil, just saying that my usual track record is that 9 times out of 10, if we go into a store that sells anything that plugs into the wall, Guy with Nametag will automatically begin talking to Rick and not me.
Sometimes, even after P explains bluntly that he's the wallet-carrying receptacle, I am the geek, and the decision is 100% up to me, they will still continue talking to him. This is the point where we leave and take our money with us. CompUSA and the Apple Store have permanently lost my business due to those kind of shenanigans.
The Sony store here is always hell on earth because it's a place tourists like to go, so the time of visit is not material, at this point. I may or may not bail on this project, I've done five campaigns back to back and Bzz seems to like me.
I think I'm also legitimately scared I might buy one, which is stupid because I can probably make a case for a work laptop at this point and I don't need two.
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Basically if it's an electronic that Sony makes, we own a Sony. The only item I think they lose ground on is the mp3 players. Granted, mine's 18 months old now but the software SUCKS and the interface is cludgy. Haven't given the newer ones a real spin.
Rafe - I think he was talking mostly to you because he knew I already HAD a Vaio laptop. It was kinda eerie. He remembered my name and the car I drive. Bob was starting to think something funny was going on.
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Maybe he thought you were trying to get me to drink the Kool Aid of true Sony Whoredom (I have a reciever & speakers by them, but that's all). :-)
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You'll get some kind of response or feedback from your bzz person, too. Mine thinks I'm kind of insane, because I bzz just like I blog, randomly and with constant weird asides. He claims to enjoy my reporting but I think my latest one for Nicorette is going to send him screaming to a mental facility. ;)
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ONE OF US!
(When we bought my laptop, he pretty much talked directly to me since I was the one making the decision)
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But to be honest, I don't think Sony is cutting edge in electronics anymore (except perhaps the Trinitron XBR series and the Playstation). My Pioneer receiver far outperforms anything Sony even makes (even the ES series). Speakers? Sony isn't even close.
But yeah, the Sony Vaio Laptops are the shiznat. In terms of sheer looks, the only thing that comes close are some of the limited ones (the Acer Ferrari comes to mind), but Sony Vaios are consistently sharp looking. Period.
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Sony needs to make Aquarium Lights imo.
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