As of this weekend, my work week gets a little weirder.  I have been working Sunday to Thursday from 1400 to 2230.  The hours remain the same, but the days shift to Saturday to Wednesday.  It was a bit strange having Sunday be my Monday, but now my weekend will be entirely in the week.  On the bright side, Saturday should be only a little busier than Sunday, so I will now have two days where I get paid mostly to screw around on my laptop.  I think I will buy another keyboard so I can type easier at work; laptop keyboards suck.

The first week of this new schedule is a little extra insane.  Officially, it starts Friday, but I have that day off by both my old and new schedule.  So I’ll work Saturday and Sunday, which will give me eight hours of overtime for the week.  Monday is a holiday and I did not manage to get scheduled to work it, so I’ll have that off before working Tuesday and Wednesday.  Then I’ll have two days off before really starting into my regular schedule.  Because I am still a contractor, I won’t get paid for the holiday, but next week’s paycheck will have the overtime on it which will more than compensate for the short check the following week.

Meanwhile, I ordered the final required component for my new computer system, and that was the RAM.  I tried to get it locally, but the computer store I went to said nobody in town sells what I need, which is 4 GB DDR3.  So I went to Amazon and looked up some RAM.  Wanting to comparison shop, I went to TigerDirect.  After checking a couple of options, I settled on a pair.  Amazon said theirs would be shipped by CompUSA as they had none in stock.  (The note on their page for this particular brand / model said it would ship in one to four weeks.  Yuck.)  Curious to see if CompUSA would offer a better price directly, I went to their website and found something interesting in the title of the site.  It said it was “powered by TigerDirect.”

Sure enough, finding my way to what I wanted was identical to what the TigerDirect site had.  In fact, when I added the RAM to my virtual cart there, it showed I already had some because I had done the same thing at TigerDirect itself.  This means that the RAM Amazon wanted to sell me came from TigerDirect as well but through the CompUSA name.  This is a little mystifying.  I know CompUSA is still a big name in spite of its demise a couple of years ago, but TigerDirect, among those who have been in the computer biz for long enough, is not unknown.  I remember seeing TigerDirect catalogs back in the eighties, long before I ever saw a CompUSA store.  Having said that, I checked Wikipedia and found CompUSA was founded first by three years, albeit under a different name.

I did check a couple of other places for the RAM I wanted, Newegg and CDW.  (For the record, Newegg was founded in 2001 and CDW in 1984, the same year as CompUSA.)  All the pricing was around the same.  I finally went with TigerDirect, which offered the least expensive shipping.  (Actually, Amazon’s shipping was a little less, but the cost of the RAM itself was a little higher.  The total cost was about the same, but I went with TD anyway.)

There are two more pieces after this to really complete my system.  The first is a power supply.  I have one, but to run the CPU I am getting, I need a better one.  I can run for a short time on the one I have, but in the long run it will burn out, so I will order a stronger one for about $100 next week.  The second thing is a new case.  I have an okay case, but quite simply I want a better one.  This I will probably get locally, but I’ll do some comparison shopping and decide from there.  The case is of less importance, but I will hopefully get it sometime in September.

That’s it for this Nothing Day.  Tomorrow will be poetry, and then next week will be a little odd.  When I started this blog on MySpace, I posted from work.  When I changed jobs, that ended because I like to post in the morning and my shift started in the afternoon.  Now I’ll not only not be posting from work, but two of my posting days will not even be workdays.  Next week’s holiday will give me three days I’ll be posting on non-working days.  Such is the weirdness of life.  See you tomorrow.