Time For a New Printer

I don't think a home printer is necessary unless you are used to having one. Over a decade ago I bought a Samsung color laser printer. It worked for a few years and then the ink started bleeding all over the pages. I thought new toner cartridges would fix the issue and they did for about 5 pages. Then the bleeding started again. We have limped along with the printer for a few years but my wife decided it needed to be replaced.

I did not do a lot of research about what to replace the old printer with. Instead I did what a lot of other people do and selected it from Costco. I really just went to the store on our monthly trip and wandered over to the electronics section to see what printers they had in stock. When I asked my wife if we should pick one up, she wouldn't let me leave the section until we had one in our cart.

At Costco there are really only 2 selections: a color laser printer from HP or a color inkjet printer from Epson. Both are great printer companies and neither is a bad choice. My son has the inkjet printer and thinks it is great. My wife suggested it based on his recommendation as well as the significant price difference. Unfortunately for my needs, the inkjet wasn't going to cut it. I often print maps on waterproof paper and the instructions that came with the paper say it only works with laser printers. If you think about it, it makes sense. Laser printers melt little plastic beads onto the paper while inkjets spray liquid ink. Waterproof paper will not accept the ink and I imagine it makes quite the mess.

I hefted the 45 pound HP LaserJet Pro MFP 3301cdw into our cart which effectively limited what other purchases we could make that day. I still ended up with a $750 bill as the printer came in at $400 before tax. We brought the new toy home and let it sit in the living room for a couple of days. Eventually I summoned the strength to move it downstairs into my basement office.

The new HP printer does more than print. It is also a scanner, fax machine, and copier. The one machine allowed me to remove my 30-year old copier from my office as well as my scanner and old Samsung printer. I have no need for a fax anymore and threw my old one away more than a decade ago. I now have a lot more table space in my office, which is a good thing.

Setting up the printer went something like this: pull the printer out of the box, plug in the power cable, plug in a network cable, set the date and time, open the printer app on any computer in the house, scan for new printers, and the printer could print. I didn't have to do anything special as it just worked. Today my wife needed to scan a document. Because the printer was set up, the scanner was too. She put the document in the sheet feeder on top and open the scan application on her laptop. Then she needed to select the "use sheet feeder" option to automatically suck the page into the scanner bed. It saved the document as a PDF file in her Pictures directory on her Mac.

The new printer installation took significantly less time than I thought it would. It works with all the computers in the house. For those that don't have network cables lying around, The printer also works on WiFi and has a touchscreen to help set that up.

Again, I don't think a home printer is necessary. But once you have had one, it is tough not to. My wife and I love the new HP and look forward to documents where the colors don't run together. 

Azure Outage Causing Problems

I am trying to get a lot of tasks done today and am being thwarted by Microsoft's Azure outage. This is not a knock against Azure as I didn't think that many services used it. It is only during an outage that you realize how much you use that service and how it affects you.

I received an e-mail from my employer letting me know that the Azure outage made it impossible to contact our travel department by phone. They suggested using e-mail should we need to talk with someone. Having taken a few trips for work, I know that e-mail is a great alternative as they are quick to respond. I didn't worry about it and kept about my daily tasks.

Next my wife informed me that Costco might be a great place to get refills for a consumable item we need to replace which is filters for our furnace because it is running more with the cold weather. I didn't want to hop in my car and so I tried to log onto the Costco website. In white letters on a blue background it says that some customers are experiencing site performance problems. While some of the site works, not everything does. For instance I can't set my local store correctly. Even though I enter my zip code, it only shows me stores in the state of Washington. Eventually they will figure it out. Of course I do have the option of running down there in my car should it be an emergency.

Several days ago I received a letter from a previous employer saying that my employee information got hacked and they are providing me with free identity protection from Cyberscout. While it makes sense to be wary of a company you have not heard about, they are legitimate and owned by TransUnion, one of the major credit bureaus. In the course of setting up my account, they need to send a code to my phone for multi-factor authentication. While the phone number I provided worked once, it didn't send the second code. To finish setting up the account I had to call their service center.

Sometimes computers greatly simplify our lives. Other times, such as in the case of downed systems, they really slow us down. Fortunately we have old backup technologies like e-mail, phones and driving to a local store to help us get stuff done.  

Best Buy For the Win

After careful consideration and thorough research I selected a new computer for my wife. I decided to get her a 13-inch MacBook air with 16 GB of RAM, the M3 processor, and 256 GB of solid-state storage. The next thing I needed to decide is where to buy it from.

Working for Sony, I have a number of fellow employees that have left and gone to work for Apple. I have helped a number of them pick up Sony products for a discount and they are willing to do the same for me. They receive a 15% discount on Apple products and so I used that as my base comparison price. If I couldn't find the computer cheaper somewhere else, I would call in a favor. That price came to $934.15 plus tax.

I keep getting daily e-mails for Costco and Best Buy, so I checked them first. Costco had the exact model I wanted for $899.99, which is cheaper than the Apple employee discount. Best Buy came in for a dollar less at an even $899.00. That became my new standard. My wife told me Amazon had a great price and so I looked there. They matched Best Buy at $899.00. I also looked at one of my favorite online stores: B&H Photo. They usually have great deals on Apple products and they didn't disappoint, or so I thought. They had the computer for $50 less. Then I carefully looked at the specs and saw that it was for the 8GB of RAM version. I'm glad I double checked all the specs. I came very close to making a big mistake.

Ultimately it came down to Amazon or Best Buy as the place to purchase the computer. How to decide? I looked at who could get it to me fastest as they both have free shipping. It turns out Best Buy beat Amazon by 2 days. That is where I made my purchase and I didn't have to call in a favor from a friend.

Batteries Not Included

About a week before Christmas I strolled through our local Costco and saw an inflatable hot tub. While I love the idea of having a hot tub, I don't want the constant maintenance hassle nor the expensive electrical bill. My parents had a hot tub and used it frequently for about a year. Then they drained it and it sat unused for several more before they happily sold it and have never regretted that decision. The idea of an inflatable hot tub appealed to me because I can take it down when it is not in use and only set it up when needed.

My wife saw the spa and told me she thought it would be a great Christmas gift. Being the good husband that I am, I went back a few days later while she was at work and bought it. Unfortunately I didn't look closely at the packaging to see that it required 1-inch chlorine tablets that are not included. Sure I could set up the hot tub but then would worry about nasty things quickly growing in it. It is sitting in my family room for the moment until I can find those 1-inch tablets.

On the way home from skiing today, I needed to run a few errands and so I went to several stores looking for the chlorine. Walmart carries them but only during the summer months here in Utah. Home Depot also has them, but again they only keep them in stock at the same time as Walmart. This evening we came home from a nice restaurant and I jumped onto Amazon to see if they could get me some by Wednesday. Nope, not until mid-January.

My wife did some searching online and found a pool-supply store close to our house but they are closed right now. Tomorrow we will go pay them a visit and we will see if we can't purchase some of the required tablets. If only I had bothered to read all of the fine print the day I purchased this magnificent gift, I would already have the one thing needed to set up the spa. I'd like to say that I will learn from this experience but honestly doubt I will.