Rotundus.com

I went out today and picked up a presentation remote thingy (that's the technical term) today, and the pricing for these thing seems totally bizarre. It lists on Office Depot's website at $40, but in the store it was $90 and I didn't feel like seeing if Office Depot would pricematch what amounts to itself. Because this more than two-fold difference in pricing annoyed me I decided to shop elsewhere, and then wandered over to Future Shop to look there.

The price listed on the shelf at Future Shop for the same model was $50. It turned out that the product was on sale for $30. I just noticed that the Future Shop website lists the product at $68. After all this, what I'm left with are a total of 5 different prices (from only two stores!) for the same product, but no two any closer than $10. How do they determine pricing these days?

Already in August I was hearing talk of letter-writing campaigns to corporations to ensure that the word 'Christmas' worked its way into their advertising at this time of year.

Recently LifeSite put out a list of "naughty" and "nice" organizations in relation to their inclusion or exclusion of "Christmas". Lifesite, as a Roman Catholic news organization, has an annoying habit of writing up a new article seemingly every time that someone in the Vatican sneezes. Being a Roman Catholic organization, there are certain things they post with which I disagree and some that I think are somewhat crazy, but they're also useful for keeping on top of a lot of news. Their naughty and nice list isn't one of the useful things though IMO. Consider the following writeup of a store from the naughty list:

Web site says "Holiday Store" and "Holiday Lighting" and only at bottom of site says "Make your Christmas decorations complete." Stores have "Holiday Home Accents."

Then compare this too a different company on the "nice" list.

Will have red and green candies with pictures of Christmas trees and angels among other images.

Does these companies really sound much different? Do I care if a company uses the word "christmas" in its advertising? (To answer that last question: I don't mind if they don't). Yinkadinay recently posted on the sillyness of some of these boycotts.

This new laptop of mine rather unsurprisingly has an ethernet connector coming out of it. However, I'm using wireless all of the time and trying to figure out how to actually disable the wired connection.

Currently, I have the card disabled in the hardware settings, have the network connection disabled, and have it set not to notify me about connectivity problems or show anything in the taskbar.

Nevertheless, somehow the card likes to reenable itself and complain about not being connected at random intervals. Any suggestions how to disable this thing? Do I need to dig into the BIOS or something (which I'd like to avoid since that is more annoying to reenable if I need a wired connection at some point)

As part of the debate over whether or not to transfer to the doctoral program where I currently am or finish a masters here and then move elsewhere to continue studies, I spent a few moments taking a glance at some of the churches in the vicinity of universities that I'd consider attending.

When looking at the website of an OPC church in Ontario, I noticed a bunch of articles posted which advocated exclusive singing of Psalms and opposed musical accompaniment. I know that in some of the reformed churches with Scottish roots that such a practice exists, and that the Reformed Presbyterian Church of North America take a similar approach. Just how common is advocacy of exclusive Psalm-singing without accompaniment in the OPC?