Big Shopper

Don't Let the Holidays Sneak Up on You

2007-11-19T22:05:00.001-08:00

I don't know about you but I always fall behind on my holiday shopping. Every year it's the same story. I'd think, "It's Halloween, I got plenty of time."

Then I'd think, "It's Thanksgiving, I got plenty of time."

Then all of a sudden it's the week before Christmas and I have to take a day off from work to run around like a madman, going from mall to mall, browsing picked over shelves and getting disapproving looks from the seasonal help that know I missed the boat and had to buy my two-year old daughter a throw-pillow as her Christmas present.

But this year is different because I have already bought all my gifts and I did it during my lunch hour.

Buy.com was perfect. I got my wife the Movado watch she has been eying. My little brother got a 30 GB Zune. My parents got web cams so they can see their granddaughter grow up. And my little girl got her very own Radio Flyer wagon and a Elmo Spin Chair.

I won't bore you with the details of all of her little friend and the gifts that I bought for them. But let's just say that Buy.com made it easy. I just went to toys and picked "2 years old" and sorted "Price Low to High" and scrolled through to find a few cheap gems for Kwanzaa, Hanukkah and Christmas. Don't tell their parents!

Anyway you cut it, I'll be a hero come Christmas morning. (Oh, I got myself a little something, too. I figure I keep it in the office until New Year's Eve and then spring it on the wife after she's told me she loves her watch for the hundredth time.

Good Luck out there and get that Elmo chair before it starts selling on the black market for $1000!

The Fruit Company

2007-11-19T01:04:00.001-08:00

Living in LA means a lot of my friends and co-workers fall into the category of "haves" and being a friend of these "haves" has a serious downside.

What do you buy someone who has it all and buys everything they want?

Well, I used to do candy and sweets but many of them started playfully cursing me for the unhealthy gift. So I needed another solution.

I found The Fruit Company online and all I can say is, "Wow! What a wide variety and selections for any price range!"

When I did a little more research I found out that even Oprah's Magazine put The Fruit Company on their "O" list.

What better endorsement can you get then Oprah? Well, I guess mine since your reading this!

Give The Fruit Company a try. There are even a few naughty treats
if you want to help someone cheat on that diet.

Sony Bravia

2007-11-03T01:57:00.000-07:00

Time keeps on tickin' into the future and in the near future those analog TV’s will go black.

That's right the FCC is pulling the plug on analog signal on February 17, 2009.

So that little TV that you keep in the beer shed in the back of your yard is going to be rendered useless and you can finally take it apart to see how all the tubes, wires and circuits work.

In our house we've slowly replaced all the TV's with Sony Bravia LCD Flat Panel HDTV's. They come in a range of styles and sizes and now they even have cool colors to choose from like "Oxygen White," Cosmo Pink," "Ocean Mist Blue" and "Green" (I guess they didn't get that named before the WGA strike).

We have a 46" over our fireplace and an Ocean Mist Blue 26" on the desk in our kitchen.

Now the best thing about the Sony's LCD screen is the crisp, bright picture in a lit room. When I was single I had the whole cinema experience but I'm married now with a kid and they like daylight. Sony's picture still pops and there is no glare on the screen at all.

We actually have one TV that's not a Sony (Long story short we won it from the store - I swear, we did!) and it's a DLP. And there are two major problems. First, it's kind of loud the 'millions-of-mirrors' have to spin or something and I can hear it whirring away in there. Second, the glare on the screen is so bad I can't have any light in the room at all - when it was in our bedroom we couldn't watch it during the day at all and at night, like I said, it had to be pitch black (not the Vin Diesel movie).

I've had Sony's all my life and they've never let me down. I gotta go I want to squeeze in another Reaper before I crash.

You can find many Sony HDTV's by clicking here: