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Jeff's master gardener course, which he starts taking online in a few days, involves printing a great deal of study materials. We haven't owned a properly functioning printer in some time. Generally, I've had bad luck with printers. I think I have owned at least four of them in the last decade and none have lasted what I would consider a reasonable lifespan. I'm quite accustomed to a paperless office approach to my own work with M-Brane and my other projects. But there's no way around needing to print stuff for his class. Even if he could figure out a paperless approach to it, then we would run into a computer usage conflict. We only have this one computer, and I can't give up as many hours of access to it as it would require for him to do all his classwork on it. So, we are once again a printing household.
We received a bit of money for Annual Gift Day from our parents and allocated a portion of it to getting a new printer, plus all the ink and paper it will need. This was a shopping ordeal, at least by our standards. Neither one of us has much stamina for shopping. "But I thought gay boys loved shopping!" some people may wonder. Well, we don't. We also don't like musical comedy or figure skating. We decided to try to get the printer at Sam's Club. We needed to restock some staple food items that we usually buy there (like coffee, bacon, cheeses, onions, garlic, olive oil), and I recalled that the last printer I had purchased about three years ago came from Sam's and seemed a good deal at the time (though it now sits derelict).
So we found what seemed to be a reasonably decent and cheap (about $49.00) printer/scanner. Cheapness was a major criterion for selection, and this one was just under my price limit of $60.00 (well, I said I wasn't going above $60, but there was no way we were coming home without a printer for J, so I was braced for a higher price if necessary). We bought the printer and congratulated each other on the way out of Sam's on how we had beaten the crowd by getting their early enough, drove home, and set to work on installing the printer. Then it all went downhill for a while. It didn't occur to us that printers might be for Windows systems only and just not have the drivers to work with a Mac. I even looked at system requirements on the box at the store, noted what Windows versions it was good for, did not see anything about Max OSX, and still bought it, just not thinking that this could be a problem. I mean, really. A goddamned printer driver? Well, as it turns out, Dell (this was a Dell-branded printer) simply does not offer Mac drivers for its printers. I did a quick scour of the intertubes, certain that someone had come up with one anyway or found a work-around for it. Site after site said the same thing: sorry, out of luck, your printer won't work with your Mac. Fuck. So we boxed it back up and set out again to Sam's...which was a human zoo by the time we got back there.
We returned the printer, got our refund and headed to Best Buy, thinking we'd have more selection in our price range, and knowing now to make certain that whatever we buy says on the box that it works with Mac OSX. Best Buy was a human zoo also, and it turned out that the only printer that was anywhere close to our price point was $70.00. Unwilling to cave at this point, we moved on to Office Depot. Though Office Depot is some kind of corner of hell on earth normally, possibly one of the most depressing retail establishments imaginable, it was not a zoo yesterday. Perhaps noon on Saturday is not the peak of shopping for office crap. But same problem as far as the printers and their prices. Again, cheapest one was $70.00. Then I said it: "Prince, we are going to have to go next door...to Walmart...and just take a quick look." His face fell. "Oh hell no!" he said. We must, I insisted. If we can save thirty or forty dollars by suffering through a few minutes of Walmart, we need to do it. The budget is too tight to stand on principle. We must at least look.
About an hour later we had a printer, the HP Deskjet D1660, $32.00 at Walmart. Since we were in the store and doomed to go through the checkout line anyway, we decided to get other tedious stuff that we would need soon anyway, like cat food and soap. On the way out of the store, J declared that he was happy to have completed his Walmart shopping "for another year," all of 2010 lying ahead, Walmart-free!
Im actually pretty impressed with this cheap little printer, by the way. He printed the first few weeks worth of his class materials last night (and we need to pick up some replacement ink already), and I was really surprised how tall a stack pages it spat out (and how quickly it did it) before ink ran down. I'm not expecting it will have a long lifespan, but if it survives J's immediate need for it, then that's good enough. And I guess I can use it if ever want to do any off-screen editing. But no one should expect to receive a physical letter from me anytime soon.
We received a bit of money for Annual Gift Day from our parents and allocated a portion of it to getting a new printer, plus all the ink and paper it will need. This was a shopping ordeal, at least by our standards. Neither one of us has much stamina for shopping. "But I thought gay boys loved shopping!" some people may wonder. Well, we don't. We also don't like musical comedy or figure skating. We decided to try to get the printer at Sam's Club. We needed to restock some staple food items that we usually buy there (like coffee, bacon, cheeses, onions, garlic, olive oil), and I recalled that the last printer I had purchased about three years ago came from Sam's and seemed a good deal at the time (though it now sits derelict).
So we found what seemed to be a reasonably decent and cheap (about $49.00) printer/scanner. Cheapness was a major criterion for selection, and this one was just under my price limit of $60.00 (well, I said I wasn't going above $60, but there was no way we were coming home without a printer for J, so I was braced for a higher price if necessary). We bought the printer and congratulated each other on the way out of Sam's on how we had beaten the crowd by getting their early enough, drove home, and set to work on installing the printer. Then it all went downhill for a while. It didn't occur to us that printers might be for Windows systems only and just not have the drivers to work with a Mac. I even looked at system requirements on the box at the store, noted what Windows versions it was good for, did not see anything about Max OSX, and still bought it, just not thinking that this could be a problem. I mean, really. A goddamned printer driver? Well, as it turns out, Dell (this was a Dell-branded printer) simply does not offer Mac drivers for its printers. I did a quick scour of the intertubes, certain that someone had come up with one anyway or found a work-around for it. Site after site said the same thing: sorry, out of luck, your printer won't work with your Mac. Fuck. So we boxed it back up and set out again to Sam's...which was a human zoo by the time we got back there.
We returned the printer, got our refund and headed to Best Buy, thinking we'd have more selection in our price range, and knowing now to make certain that whatever we buy says on the box that it works with Mac OSX. Best Buy was a human zoo also, and it turned out that the only printer that was anywhere close to our price point was $70.00. Unwilling to cave at this point, we moved on to Office Depot. Though Office Depot is some kind of corner of hell on earth normally, possibly one of the most depressing retail establishments imaginable, it was not a zoo yesterday. Perhaps noon on Saturday is not the peak of shopping for office crap. But same problem as far as the printers and their prices. Again, cheapest one was $70.00. Then I said it: "Prince, we are going to have to go next door...to Walmart...and just take a quick look." His face fell. "Oh hell no!" he said. We must, I insisted. If we can save thirty or forty dollars by suffering through a few minutes of Walmart, we need to do it. The budget is too tight to stand on principle. We must at least look.
About an hour later we had a printer, the HP Deskjet D1660, $32.00 at Walmart. Since we were in the store and doomed to go through the checkout line anyway, we decided to get other tedious stuff that we would need soon anyway, like cat food and soap. On the way out of the store, J declared that he was happy to have completed his Walmart shopping "for another year," all of 2010 lying ahead, Walmart-free!
Im actually pretty impressed with this cheap little printer, by the way. He printed the first few weeks worth of his class materials last night (and we need to pick up some replacement ink already), and I was really surprised how tall a stack pages it spat out (and how quickly it did it) before ink ran down. I'm not expecting it will have a long lifespan, but if it survives J's immediate need for it, then that's good enough. And I guess I can use it if ever want to do any off-screen editing. But no one should expect to receive a physical letter from me anytime soon.
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