Why Does Costco's Local Book Selection Suck

If you ever go to Costco's web site and look at their selection of children's books you would find a lot of excellent titles to choose from. Some examples are Diary of a Worm, Where the Wild Things Are, and The Three Snow Bears. This doesn't include series books like Harry Potter or A Series of Unfortunate Events.

Now contrast this with the Costco's in the Treasure Valley. You'll find huge piles of gimmick books, you know the kind that have a toy packed in or buttons you push with very little story to them. Sure you can find the latest Harry Potter.

The selection is nothing close to what it looks like online. In fact you don't really see the gimmick books there. Why the difference?

Costco would get a lot more of my money if this was changed but whoever stocks their stores either doesn't have kids, or doesn't like to read to them.

Of Mice and Men - The Movie

So I finally watched the 1992 movie Of Mice and Men.

For a movie adaptation it does a good job of keeping the spirit of the book and staying true to it. As always there's things that happen in the book that are either excluded or shortened for the sake of the movie. If you are a person who is pressed for time or just too lazy this movie would be a good substitute for the book. For everyone else I'd read the book first and then the movie.

Whither IM Users

Does anyone really use IM clients anymore? I never really hear anything going on with them, with the exception of each dot release of OS X where they add functionality.

Now I don't have a lot of buddies so that could be a part of it, but even of those that I do have I think I only see one or two of them online at all and neither one of us initiate a chat. Part of the problem my be because my primary client is through Google and their Google Talk within Gmail can be hard to notice that someone is trying to chat with you.

Or maybe everyone is trying to avoid me. That's food for thought.

These thoughts exclude folks who use an IM client at work as that's a different situation.

So tell me, have you noticed the same thing?

Brad Paisley Concert

The wife and I don't get out too much any more but on the 23 of January we went to see Brad Paisley in concert. His opening acts where Chuck Wicks and Rodney Atkins.

All three put on an amazing show, however, Brad is by far the most talented of the bunch. He also played the longest as his piece went from 9:30 p.m. until 11:20 p.m.

The most enjoyable part of the concert was when he had all of his band members take a break and it was just Brad and his acoustic guitar playing three or four songs.

I'm not big on going to concerts since a lot of times the groups don't sound that good and I don't feel that you get your money's worth. Brad Paisley is the exact opposite. His shows are well worth the money and he sounds as good in person as he does on his albums.