a diamond by any other…seller

is a costco diamond ring any less meaningful than a tiffany ring? i didn’t say valuable because it seems that tiffany believes that their jewelry is far more valuable than anyone else’s. how would you feel on this valentine’s day, you proposed/were proposed to with a costco ring? would that makes things any less meaningful? does it matter where your ring is from?

i was at costco picking up some lunch and noticed that costco sells diamond rings. a lot of them. one would imagine that the price of the costco rings must be pretty competitive and the value would be reasonably good. i’ve actually heard that costco diaminds are of high quality.

so why is it that the diamond ring counter at costco wasn’t that busy today? why is it that it hasn’t been noticeably more busy in recent weeks?

yes, today is valentine’s day. it’s a day marked with emotions high and low. a day of stress, a day of happiness, a day of high expectations. i was watching tv today and they said that men, on average, spend $136 on valentine gifts. women, on the other hand, spend an average of $68. 1

valentine’s day is also the #1 holiday for floral sales. while i was driving around today, i saw a bunch of temporary flower stands at street corners all along my commute to work. i guess it’s true, everybody is trying to cash in on this valentine’s day.

some people call today single’s awareness day. i think that’s pretty funny. whatever the case may be, i hope that all of you have a wonderful february 14th.

  1. http://retailindustry.about.com/od/sales_holiday/a/valentines_day.htm []

DNS-323 review

i bought a d-link dns-323 a little while ago. it is an embedded linux NAS device. plop two SATA drives in it, plug it in to the ethernet port and it’s ready to go.

from a performance standpoint, it does reasonably well. on the wire, it does about 10-12MB/s. in my wireless network, it has no problems streaming out the files to my media device. pure speed was not really as important as network storage was for me and this device has been doing great in those regards.

Continue reading DNS-323 review