Well, finding the presents did not cost us a lot of time. A new bag for school, some stuff for her new room and the touchscreen of her Nintendo DS was broken, so replacing that would also be an awesome present. After looking around on the internet, I (suffering from this again) decided it would be better to just order a new Nintendo 3DS. Her being a girl and all we looked where we could find the pink version, which were hard to find this close to the holidays. After a search we found one at a webshop, that actually had one in stock, YAY!

Ordered it, paid iDEAL (instant payment from your bank account) and received a confirmation of my order within a couple of minutes. Success! The next day I received a confirmation that my order was packed and prepared for sending using the company GLS. I received a tracking code and everything seemed fine.

A day later, I was working till around 16:00 (4:00 PM) which meant I was home all day, but after that we had to go to one of nieces’ birthday party, but the package was not delivered yet. I checked the tracking code online and it showed me the package was ready to be delivered, but that the chauffeur hadn’t reached my house yet. No worries there, because most of the transport companies just deliver the package to one of my neighbors when nobody answers the door.

An hour later, at the party, I check the tracking code again, eager to see if the package has been delivered.

Yay! The package has been delivered! It says “Aflevering” at “Laatste afhandeling”, which means that it has been delivered. In the column “Naam ontvanger” it says “RENE”, which means that the person accepting the package is called Rene. That worried me a bit, because I know all of my neighbors by name and none of them is called Rene, but I thought it could be the weird text-recognition thing they use when signing for the package. I am glad that we can actually see the signature of the person accepting the package.

Ok, it still says that it was accepted by someone called Rene and the signature, well, it’s a signature. So after we got home from the party, it was about 19:30 (7:30 PM) we thought we would find a note which would say at which house it was delivered instead of ours, but there was no note (crap). So I decided to go to our nearest neighbors first, to ask if they have received a package. After ringing a couple of doorbells and asking my neighbors if maybe they received anything I got a bit more worried. Asking anyone in the street would be a lot of doors to ring, so I decided to do a couple more and ask if they knew anyone in our street called Rene. Nope, no package to be found and no Rene lives in our street.

So that evening my wife decides to send an email to transport company, asking where our package is. The next morning I decided a shorter route would be to just give them a call. A very friendly woman on the phone told me she already read our email and she would call the chauffeur to ask where our package went. While I was on hold, she called the chauffeur and asked where he did leave the package, his answer was: “I don’t know anymore, maybe I’ll remember when I get back to their house”. Of course this person delivers a lot of packages each day, so not remembering everything is OK, but it seems weird to not register it in your system when you deliver a package to a different house when the recipient is not at home. He told the woman on the phone he would drive by my house to clear everything up.

About an hour later, my doorbell rings. The chauffeur was at the door, with a package in his hands! He told me that it was delivered at my neighbors house, where he just picked it up and took it to my house. Sure I am glad that the package was found, but that story is just weird. I talked to that neighbor the evening before and they didn’t receive any packages, I know all my neighbors pretty well and consider them trustworthy. Was the package indeed delivered to them or did the chauffeur make stuff up?

After I received the package, I received an email from the office of GLS, asking me if everything was cleared up. Of course, I got my package, but it all seems very strange. I am not really sure what is going on, but with all the stories of packages disappearing people tend to draw their own conclusions.

Would my package ever show up again if we didn’t call/email the company immediately?
Where was the package, when they said it was delivered, but it wasn’t?
Should a tracking system no keep track of a package until it was actually delivered to the recipient?

I don’t know the answers to these questions, but you really don’t want to know the answers I think of.

For example my TV. When I bought it I knew exactly what it looked like. The front, sides AND the back. I had skipped through the device manual to see if certain stuff was possible and it had everything I was looking for.

The whole process of comparing and buying it took me over 4 days. Buying it was a breeze though, because all I had to do was to find the web-shop with a good prize/delivery-time.

Only sometimes this process really haunts me.

Last week my oldest daughter (of 6 years old) had to have one of her back tooth pulled and because this is a very painful process we promised her a gift once it was all over. My wife and I already talked it over, because she wanted a radio/cd player on her room for a long time now, so this was the perfect moment to get it for her.

Well this weekend we have been hunting the internet for a radio that she liked. First of all, it had to be pink (according to her), have a FM radio and a CD player. Finding something like that, for an affordable price (let’s say for around 50 euros) was easy.

Then it struck me again, I was not going to burn all her MP3′s to CD anymore. She already has a MP3 player (an old iPhone 3G, 16GB) with all of her favorite songs and it would make more sense to search for a radio that supported external sound sources. I also didn’t want her to have plastic speakers with it, because they sound like ****. Before I knew it I started looking for well-known brands that offer simple radio’s and HIFI sets for that kind of money and I was wiping that “it has to be pink” feature of the table.

Long story short. Why do I give so much about this stuff? Why does the radio of my daughter have to fit in my ideas of good equipment? Sure, a better product lasts longer, but we are not talking about a radio of hundreds of euros here. By the time she turns 10, she wants a new one anyway, because of how out-dated it is.

I just hope my wife takes care of this, before we have to install a 7.1 DTS certified receiver in her room, which has an iPhone integration unit and a touch-screen remote control.

PS. I do love it though, spec-comparing is really the best there is. After the purchase that all fades away and it’s just a normal TV/radio/phone/etc.

I will now show you a pic, of my desk (made with my iPhone 4) and this is after I cleaned it up a bit already:

(click to enlarge)

As you can see, it automatically creates a mess at your desk, when you have more than 1 thing going on. I still have a couple of problems with my setup, and since I have more than 2 readers nowadays, I hope you can help me out.

- I have a MacBook Pro, which only has a DVI out. Which means if I want to use 2 monitors, one of them has to be the laptop monitor. I would love to use both my normal monitors.
- Next to my MacBook Pro I have a HP Elitebook 8540W, which runs Windows. This laptop has a DisplayPort and a D-SUB connector. Again, this setup does not make full usage of my HDMI/DVI equipped monitors.
- Because my laptops are on the left side of my desk, and my mouse(s) are on the right side, there is a lot of interference. As soon as my Apple keyboard is between my mouse and my laptops, my mouses stop working.

So yeah, what do I want?

- I want to get myself an extra monitor, but only if I can connect all 3 of them to my Windows laptop (and maybe 2 to my MacBook Pro).
- Should I get a KVM switch ? For my keyboard? Now I just switch cables between them, when I switch laptops. Mouses are both bluetooth.
- I want to get my monitors on those arm stands, and clean up the cables. Because now it looks like shit. When my Monitors are on the the arm-stands, I could put my laptops beneath the monitors and they would be closer to my mouse, probably solving my mouse-connection-interference problem.

Jeff Atwood did a blog post about monitor arms from Ergotron a couple of years back. Are they still the best way to go? They are a bit to expensive to just order them to try them out.

Is there anyone with any good ideas for this “problem” ?