Deb's Home

Deb Is Home Safely

We are so greatful that she arrived safely. Late, but safely. She arrived on the crest of the wave of holiday weekend traffic about 5:30 PM. Why so late when class got out about 12:30 PM?

Ah! The Book Tale:

The college in their infinite wisdom decided, literally at the last moment, to go out of the bookselling business to concentrate on their core business: education. When the students arrived they discovered that they needed to order their books online. Jean, always helpful, ordered Deb's when she got home from helping Deb move to college. So far, so good.

We "joined" Barnes and Noble to get a discount (the discount just about covered the cost of the annual membership). With 8 days to spare we used the basic shipping option which "guaranteed" that UPS would get it there in time (3-5 business days). It turns out that the "guarantee" is not a guarantee.

First of all, B&N let the order sit for 23 hours and 50 minutes before shipping it.

Then UPS took 1 1/2 days to "get it into the system" and when UPS finally did get it into the system and it was on its way...it disappeared! So they re-scheduled the delivery. And then didn't make the new delivery date. It turns out that the tracking label got damaged and was unreadable so after the books got within about 10 miles of Deb's college UPS decided to cut its losses and just ship them back to B&N.

Jean had been calling B&N and UPS daily and emailing them. When she finally heard that the order was irrevocably kaput, she ordered the books again and this time got "Express" air shipping.

At first it appeared that the second order wasn't going to be much better than the first order according to the tracking log online. It turns out that the tracking just didn't keep up with the books themselves which turned up at the college YESTERDAY! Just a couple days after they were ordered. Deb stayed by to track them down and get them into her room before she left.

And then she stopped at Bolton Orchards' store and brought home a box of Cortland apples for us to eat and share.

Deb's Dell 5100

Once she was home we set up her new computer for her to use while she is here.



Tonight we will install her wireless network card so that it will be ready to go.

This Dell 5100 was bought, as usual from the Dell outlet at a significant discount from their "retail" price. It is interesting because it has no legacy ports at all. None. No printer port, serial port, PS-2 mouse port, PS-2 keyboard port. Just seven USB 2.0 ports. Good thing she has a USB printer.




Fortunately, the computer came with a USB multimedia keyboard with a wrist rest (and two USP ports) and a USB mouse, though Deb has a USB Evoluent mouse at school to install.

Deb is impressed with the improvement in speed with her "graduation present" that just happened to be available now. Her computer will be passed along and stay in circulation.

You will notice that I have added a second CD-ROM drive that I found hanging around as a "spare" in the attic when I cleaned out nearly 15 years of computer program boxes and instruction books. It is a Memorex 48X CD-ROM drive that I bought to "upgrade" a previous computer. It takes the place of an internal Zip drive. For now I have connected my USB Zip drive while she is home.