I’ve decided I will never buy another inkjet printer. I just passed my third one, an Epson 740, to Kevin, after getting so fed up with it this weekend that it nearly ended up in the garage under my 5 pound sledge. I decided to buy a laser printer, a Samsung ML-1710 that I had been eyeing for a couple of months. After some research I bought it from BestBuy.com and during the checkout process they noted that if I wanted I could do in-store pickup and not have to wait for the shipping. Sounded good, I went for it. This was Thursday last week. The printer had a rebate on it which expired on Saturday. Bestbuy promptly sent me an email telling me my order was in process and as soon as they confirmed availablity at my local store, they’d email me. This gave me pause, since they had just told me it was available during the checkout process, but whatever, I wasn’t planning to pick it up until Saturday.

Except Saturday rolled around and still no confirmation email. Finally I called them, a frustrating process since never in their phone hell voicemail tree do they mention how to get a hold of a person, and none of the choices were about cancelling orders, but ultimately I prevailed and cancelled the order when the person couldn’t confirm to me that my printer would be ready that day. I then went with plan B, which was to pickup the printer at Circuit City. Went through the same process of ordering online, including selecting in-store pickup, then drove to Circuit City and got my printer. Out of curiousity, I checked Best Buy since it’s right near the Circuit City, and they had a stack of at least 10 Samsung 1710′s sitting on the shelf. The lesson here is Best Buy sucks – don’t use their in-store pickup function. I am at least partly convinced this was intentional on their part – the printer was $20 cheaper at Best Buy, which had a $120 rebate compared to Circuit City’s $100, but which only lasted for 3 days – my bet is they would have given me my printer the day after the rebate expired. Or maybe they’re just technically incompetent, or ruled by their marketing department, which saw Circuit City’s advertising blitz for their in-store pickup feature during the NFL season and decided they needed to offer it too even if they couldn’t actually accomplish it with anything resembling efficiency. Whatever. Ultimately I don’t care, aside from knowing I won’t try using it again.

[the printer's great so far, btw. Fast, relatively quiet, excellent output quality]

Google just introduced a number of features, the coolest of which is their new catalog search. They’ve scanned in tons of catalogs, from the common Dell and Crutchfield to the ‘bet you didn’t know this existed’ catalogs like the Hamilton Eye Warehouse. Just the fact that they’ve managed to get all this data scanned in is amazing – what’s even better is you can use full text search on the catalogs and their interface will graphically highlight where it finds your search terms right on the jpegs. The next time you’re searching for just the right prop for your hallowe’en party or some Wormwood for that next batch of Absinthe you’re planning to brew, give this a try – it works remarkably well for something still in beta.

I’m very pleased to observe that for the first time a gaming trade show is coming to the east coast. It’s not E3, but I’ll take it. You can already register for this fall’s GameonNY show, and at $10 for a 3-day pass it’s cheap. I’ll definitely be going and hopefully I will even manage to convince a couple of my friends to work with me as a team in the tournaments, even if we would be doomed to defeat at the hands of the 20-somethings.

I’ve got my fingers crossed that this will go over well and become an annual event. I’ve been jonesing to go to E3 for at least 10 years. I almost managed it once during my time with the newspapers, when they were sending me out on the trade show circuit 3 months out of the year, and my last boss and I discussed it as a possibility but never got serious about it. Now I finally have a real chance to check one out.

Anyone who’s going drop me an email or post a comment so I know who to try and pull together for some FPS tournament action.

I use a variety of websites on a regular basis to track prices on stuff, especially technology and videogames – sites like bensbargains and techbargains and the hot deals forums on anandtech. The sites are tremendously useful and I’ve saved a ton of money over the last couple of years – much more useful than places like pricegrabber, which only track official retail prices – but it’s a bit of a chore to pore over the listings each day when I’m looking for a deal on something specific.

Enter dealsites.net, which attempts to aggregate all the deals found on the other deal websites into one interface with a search engine, custom RSS feeds, and forums. It’s a little rough around the edges, but simply being able to set a custom search and get a notification of when, where and for how much a particular item becomes available is just great.