I don’t think I would ever buy a watch from a boutique. There’s something more traditional and familiar buying from a local dealer who you can develop a relationship with over time. Since I live in the New York metropolitan area, there’s certainly no shortage of fine dealers in the immediate area which isn’t the case in most parts of the country (and world). Perhaps someone coming to New York wanting to buy a Breguet or other fine watch not immediately available where they live and work would feel more comfortable going right to the boutique. Maybe with all the commerce done over the internet, going to a ‘brick and mortar’ shop to buy is a fading business model anyway.

While having a boutique probably expands the brand visibility, it also excesses the manufacturer’s traditional partner, the independent authorized dealer. Options are always better for the consumer but the boutique option isn’t a desireable option for me.

My LUC Sport 2000 has been in to Chopard’s service facility twice in the five years since I’ve owned it. The first time was under warranty when the crown fell off. Last month, I brought it in for it’s first overhaul. The automatic winding system apparently failed which while disappointing, wasn’t unexpected since it’s a true sport watch that patrols the soccer field as well as going swimming with me. The repair was covered as part of a standard overhaul service which was done within 30 days.

Since I’m in New York City everyday, I have easy access to the Chopard Service facility, located on 63rd Street in Manhattan. Before the relatively new Boutique was built on Madison Ave., you went directly to the service facility to drop off and pick up the watch. Now, you go to the Boutique for that procedure and get the opportunity to be tempted to get a new Chopard. Fun but not great for the wallet.

After two unsuccessful listings on eBay, I decided to contact NewEgg and tell them my tale of woe. I fully expected the ‘caveat emptor’ treatment but instead, they gave me an RMA, waived the restocking fee and gave me full store credit for the monitor. Thanks NewEgg!!

I wanted to like Essentials but it took about an hour before I realized the lack of basic features can’t be worked around.

I was reading about contact forms at wpengineer and the code included the wp_enqueue_script call right in the template before the get_header() call. Brilliant! I had never read that about that technique. You don’t have to write conditional statements nor hook in within the functions.php file. This is especially handy if you use a premium theme. Premium themes usually have a functions.php file that includes a huge caveat not to modify it (for a lot of good reasons). An even better benefit to modifying the template is as your theme is updated, you don’t have to worry about carrying over custom edits.

Unprofessional Foul.

Now all HP drivers are included (and updated) with Snow Leopard system updates from Apple. Everything’s built in so you don’t have to load HP’s drivers separately. I have an older HP printer with wifi and remembered that you have to configure the wireless via a hard network connection and the printer’s built in wireless configuration web page. However the new HP printer didn’t have a wired ethernet connection. Just a USB port which ain’t a network connection. Hmm.

So how does one configure the device’s wireless capability to a closed network? It’s not really well documented anywhere. Turns out, the printer default settings (once you turn the wireless on on the printer touch screen) sets up an open network called ‘hpsetup’. So I connected my iMac to this new network, went to the Print and Fax in my system preferences and clicked on Add a Printer via Bonjour. Sure enough, it found the new printer and made a connection. Open the Print Utility which will allow you to open the printer’s built in web page to configure the wireless. I clicked on Advanced, changed the SSID and password to match my home network settings and hit ‘apply’. Be careful here to get everything correctly typed because when you hit ‘apply’ it changes the printer’s wireless settings immediately. The page will not reload in your web browser because you’re no longer connected to the printer wirelessly. Don’t worry.

Disconnect from the wireless ‘hpsetup’ network and reconnect to your home network. The printer/fax/scanner will show up in your Print and Fax panel of the System Preferences.

So I turned on the trusty external firewire disk and told Disk Warrior to start backing up. Life would have been less stressful if I used Time Machine but that’s a discussion for another day. Anyway, My Mini (Intel late 2006) was struggling on 1Gb of RAM so I had planned to replace it on my terms.

Back to the Apple Store, this time with my eye on a new iMac (23″ with 1 Tb of storage and the ATI Radeon graphics card). Came home, hooked it up, connected the external firewire drive (FW 800!!) and was back in business with no data loss in a couple of hours. That’s what I call making the best of a bad situation.

I’ve spent a fair share of time going through the EC3 code over the past couple of years and couldn’t figure out what EC3 and comments had to do with each other. EC3 does highjack some feeds and futz with canonical redirects but everything I saw in the code seemed benign. I commented out some of the redirect functions with no luck. On my other blog with E3.1.4, my comments feed was fine and the plugin is still solid despite its apparent abandonment. Odd. After a couple of hours of troubleshooting, I packed it in.

Fortunately, I hit gold on my first stop through the WordPress plugin repository with Kieran’s excellent calendar plugin. It’s a no nonsense big calendar with two useful template tags to generate lists of events. While similar to EC3 in that it uses a separate table to store event data, it differs in that you add the events using a backend form rather than the posting method EC3 uses. You can link the event on the calendar to a blog posting (or any other url) which is a nice touch as well. Kieran’s plugin also seems pretty bulletproof as WordPress evolves.

It’s sad when a plugin withers away but plugin authors are very special people who give without compensation (for the most part) and are swamped with support requests from all kinds of folks who should have RTFM. When or if EC3.1.4 finally breaks, there’s an alternative.