chronovore: (mouthy)
The Apostrophe:
• add 's to the end of compound words:
my brother-in-law's money
I'm down with this. Way down. But since the plural of "brother-in-law" is "brothers-in-law," how do you make a possessive form of that?
chronovore: (Default)
My company wants to get a couple of the old Logitech Driving Force units purchased from the USA and shipped express-super-immediate to Japan. (Edit: These are not the more recent Driving Force EX models, which have a different pipeline for support.)

Amazon shows the very model I want, partnered with TigerDirect, CompUSA, and various other dealers. Using Tiger Direct, the two controllers come out to US$110, but the shipping fees for standard shipping come out to over twice that, so the total bill is well over US$330. Worst of all, TigerDirect's Amazon shipping policies say that it would take 9-16 days, which we don't have.

Using my hotel-booking-fu, I realize that going directly to the source can have better rates, so I go to tigerdirect.com and compusa.com, which both have the same item price, more reasonable shipping prices, but DIFFERENT CAVEATS on placing the orders. The former will not accept my lovely, high-limit corporate Visa card, only wire transfers, while the latter will only take international orders at all if I call them between 0900 and 1800 CT (which I assume is American Central Standard Time Zone) — which isn't really the best sign of support for international customers — and only then can I find out how long it will take them to ship, though I think it mentioned UPS International Next Day, which would be suh-weet.

I know this is crazy-as-in-nuts level of no notice, but any advice?
chronovore: (Default)
What is the difference between an LCD monitor and an LCD TV? For a 15" monitor, I am seeing the damned things for about ¥25,000 (recently ¥109 = US$1), and 15" TVs are still running ¥40,000. I am assuming that there is a TV band tuner in the latter; apparently those cost a lot of money? TV Capture devices run about just under ¥20,000 here for an external unit, though it is now par for the course for midrange PCs now include an internal unit. Speaking of "par for the course" Samsung's recent range of TVs also have a 15-pin connection and advertise their use as a monitor as one of the primary features. I am also seeing not-unreasonably priced WindowsXP home entertainment setups with widecreen LCDs running about 24"-27" - These have a P4 2.8GHz in 'em, and a 300GB HDD, and are running about US$2400.

So LCDs, the de facto choice for monitor in space-starved Japan, are coming down in price, but at the same size scale the TVs are still expensive. The standard NTSC picture displayed on them looks like crap compared to a high resolution Windows screen, but that's probably a source signal issue. What am I missing, and what should I beware when looking at monitors vs. TVs?

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