Written on Thursday, May 14, 2009 at 1:36 PM by jkeyes0
The wife and I went for our vision checkup recently. It had been almost 2 years since we were last checked and got glasses and I kept thinking about the outrageous price we always have to pay. $300-400 for a halfway decent looking pair of glasses is just unacceptable!
This got me thinking: I buy almost everything I need online, why not glasses too? I did some research, and thanks to Ira over at http://www.glassyeyes.com/ I decided to give a couple of online retailers a shot.
The wife and I placed our first order from http://www.coastalcontacts.com. I ordered a pair of Ltede 1009's:
and she ordered the Coach Gretta's (no longer available):
Total spent? $165, where we would have easily spent $600-800 in-store. We both opted for the thinner, polycarbonate lenses, which made my glasses $31 and hers $134.
Thinking that the polycarb lenses would take a lot longer to manufacture and wanting a pair sooner, I ordered a pair of Kam Dhillon 3010's:
Not the best looking glasses, but for $6.95 (free shipping using code "FREESHIP") it's hard to complain.
I expected it to take longer, quite frankly. We placed our orders late on the evening of May 6th and during the day on May 7th, and the second order shipped on May 12th, arriving today. The first order should be here tomorrow, hopefully, if not Monday.
I've got to say, I'm definitely pleased with these frames. I expected the lenses to be much thicker as well, but they're not bad at all! Here's the glasses sitting on our couch:
and here they are on my ugly mug!
The prescription is nice and clear, which is all I can ask for. It may not be 100% accurate under an optician's measuring tools, but it's good enough for me, and excellent for $7.
I'll post updates as I receive the rest of the glasses. We also ordered some generic sunglasses from http://www.zennioptical.com, so I'll post when we get those as well.
Written on Saturday, April 25, 2009 at 10:14 AM by jkeyes0
After our last trip to Ashland to see the parents, Christina decided that we need a van. Yeah, we only have one kid and a dog, but when you pack the dog's carrier, baby stroller, bags for each of us (including at least one for the boy) and anything else into our tiny little Corolla, there's no room left for us to ride! The added reasoning is we're going on vacation with Christina's parents later this year, and none of us have a van. This way we can all go in one vehicle with little effort.
Christina did quite a bit of research and ended up deciding on the Toyota Sienna. Long story short, we bought a 2005 Sienna with 36.5k miles on it. The price was a little higher than we wanted to pay, and they didn't give us exactly as much as I would have liked for my truck (2006 Nissan Frontier), but the payment didn't go up much from where I was, and the term is about the same as I had left on the truck.
The problem, in my opinion, is that the salesman at Glenn Toyota in Frankfort made it sound like the "Toyota Certified" part of the vehicle gave it a 7-year/100,000 mile warranty. It does, but not in the way you'd think. You would think 7 years from today, and 100,000 miles from the current mileage. Instead, it's 7 years from ORIGINAL purchase date (back in 2005), and 100,000 TOTAL miles. That means it's more of a 3-year/63,000 mile warranty. Not quite as nice.
Add to that the salesman kept telling us there would be two keys/keyfobs. We're home with the vehicle, and still only have one key/keyfob. He said he would search back at the dealership for a second key and bring it to us, but we may or may not get a second keyfob. Argh.
Basically, my review of Glenn Toyota is: If you're going to buy a vehicle, you can't do much better than a Toyota, but make sure to get EVERYTHING in writing, and don't be afraid to walk away. We were actually about to walk away because they wouldn't go anywhere NEAR where we wanted to be as far as payments, but they got close enough... and Christina really wanted that van.
If I had it to do over again, I would probably have done a lot more research and found a better deal, or pushed a bit harder to get a better price from Glenn Toyota. I won't be so easily fleeced next time...
Written on Thursday, April 23, 2009 at 12:07 PM by jkeyes0
On May 9th from 4pm - 7pm EST, the
BGLUG in association with the Ubuntu Kentucky LoCo Team will be hosting a release party for the newest version of Ubuntu: Jaunty Jackalope. The event will be held at Tates Creek Christian Church:
View Larger MapCome join us for some free food, good fun, presentations, and a lot of geeking out!
Written on Wednesday, April 15, 2009 at 9:06 AM by jkeyes0
I expected this day would come, but I always kind of hoped it wouldn't. When I started developing my cabinet's new website using Django, I thought I could get away with using open source, non-Microsoft software and give my cabinet a safe, fast website that's easy to maintain. I was wrong...
My supervisor came to me at the end of last week and told me he'd heard back from the Enterprise Standards people here at the state, and that while they wouldn't shut us down for using it, they highly frown upon using non-MS software, so we should really stop it. :( Luckily (or so I thought), I stumbled upon ASP.NET MVC. Seems to be a Microsoft alternative to Django that just came out about a month ago. I've started going through the tutorials on that site, and while it will most likely work for what we're doing, it's PAINFUL! Things that used to take one or two lines in Django are taking pages and pages of code. A lot of it is automatically generated by Visual Studio, and some more of it I can take directly from the examples in the tutorials, but there's still a LOT of work that has to be redone manually.
Sigh... I'll let you know what happens as I learn more about this new MVC.
Written on Wednesday, March 25, 2009 at 1:18 PM by jkeyes0
Well, I've been at my current job for almost 3 months now, and I'm still greatly enjoying it. Every day brings with it a new set of challenges, so there's little chance of things becoming stale and me getting burned out. I've been redesigning some of our C# ASP.NET applications, writing new C# console apps, and working quite a bit with Python, because I got the green light to redesign our main website using Django.
The main issue I had with Django was the lack of multi-database support. Thanks to Eric Florenzano's blog, I found a way to make it work! It's been about a week since I really did anything to the site because I've been called away to do other things, but I've tested using multiple databases and everything works wonderfully.
Speaking of Django, I've got a friend in the BGLUG who has expressed a need for a pet grooming application. The one he was looking at is a standalone Windows-only app, but I think it would be pretty painless to turn it into a web app with Django. It's pretty much just a few tables (customers, pets, appointments, employees, etc) with graphical interfaces to manipulate the data.
In other news, I've lost 10lbs since I posted about shaving my beard off (I started at 205, as of this morning I'm at 194). I've gotten lazy in the last few days and haven't shaven, so my beard is growing back. I would keep it off because of my resolution, but I'm going to keep losing weight, so I feel comfortable going ahead and letting it come back. My goal is still to lose 30lbs before the year is over, which will put me at 175. I really need to start running again. I was doing the 10-minute trainer series before Duncan was born (if you hadn't heard, check my facebook account... we had a baby!), but I haven't had any time in the evenings to work out lately, so I've just been losing weight by eating a little better.
I'll keep plugging away at my programming, and try to run when I have time. As a matter of fact, I'm going to go for a walk at work now. It looks like the rain has stopped. Later guys!
