A number of words can describe jury duty but the one word I’d use is… boring. Mind you it is an important duty but damn, it’s boring. So I get a jury duty summons and, since I already had postponed it once, I had to answer it. So, at the ungodly hour of 8am, I arrive at the jury assembly room. Actually make that a wee bit after 8am due to a sudden rush of traffic at McDonalds (did all those people know I was in a hurry?). One thing that happens when you’re just a bit late is that when you enter a big full room, everyone else is already seated and filling out forms. And all those people are noticing you’re late and most likely clueless since you weren’t there for the preliminary instructions. Needless to say I felt conspicuous and tried to camouflage myself by pretending to know what I was doing.

I approached the front desk and was instructed to find my juror number on the forms and then fill out more forms. Well my juror number wasn’t there. Did this mean I could escape? Dangit, nope. I had to manually add my juror number to the list. The forms I had to fill out were fairly short and basic. So I did all that and then waited. Fortunately I brought the netbook. Unfortunately there wasn’t an access point I could be allowed to use. No Net! Ah the torture!

After some time passed we were forced to watch a 15 minute video about jury duty. That’s right, forced… “You will watch this video and you will like it” The last time I was summoned, this video was so old and corny it looked like it was straight out of the 50s. Picture June Cleaver cheerfully telling you in minute detail all about jury duty and how it fits into the legal system. Well it turns out they now have a modernized version of the video but it’s still pretty dry material.

So I sat through all that and then the jury coordinator starts talking to us about how we have a different sort of jury that will need to be selected today. A Grand Jury. Uh oh. That means long days, whole month of commitment sort of thing. They shuffled us into a courtroom next door and had us take seats. On the far side of the room were 7 chairs. These are the special chairs where the chosen ones will end up sitting. I wanted to avoid those chairs at all costs. So did everyone else by the look of things. We carefully avoided looking at those chairs and waited for the Judge to come into the room and start the selection process. The waiting seemed to take forever.

Finally the judge entered the room, we stood up, she sat down, we sat down. She gives us the general instructions on the selection process. They’re going to pick 7 people randomly from the jury pool sitting in the room. They start calling out Juror numbers and each person called sits down in one of the special chairs. I am thinking to myself, “Please don’t call 207″. They don’t call 207. Whew, so far so good. The Judge says if there’s undue hardship in serving on the Grand Jury, which is a one month commitment and pretty much all weekdays, then you can be excused and they’ll select another juror. A nervous woman spoke up. They’re going to be doing down-sizing where she works and she may be getting the axe. If she’s gone for weeks before this down-sizing then she’s certain she’s going to get the axe. No wonder she’s so nervous. The judge views losing a job as undue hardship, no surprise there, and lets the nervous woman go.

Another juror number is called but it’s not 207. More questions from the judge about undue hardship. Another juror gets excused. This goes on for about 5 more times. Each time my heart sinks into my stomach when they call a juror number. Each time I escape. Then one of the chosen ones, who had been sitting quietly this whole time, suddenly says that he has job issues too! I wanted to throttle him He gets let off and another replacement is called but again, it’s not me. Finally they have the 7 chosen ones selected. Brave souls that I, and pretty much every other person in that room, wanted to thank profusely.

The chosen ones are escorted to the promised land (Main Courthouse) and the rest of us are released for the day with instructions to call in each night for the rest of the week to see if our number is called. So each night I called but number 207 never came up. And so ends my foray into Jury Duty… well at least for 2 years

Our old PS3 80 Gig “Phat” game system developed issues with the Blu-ray drive. At first the graphics glitches and game freezes were so intermittent that we tolerated it. Then one night we couldn’t get into the 3rd quarter without NBA 2K10 freezing. This was unacceptable as we’re total basketball addicts and needed our fix. We also grew quite tired of playing the Nuggets over and over .

Our choices for fixing the Blu-ray drive were to send the PS3 and $150 to Sony, buy a Blu-ray lens on eBay from some dude and hope we can install it without making things even worse, or buy a new PS3 for around $300. We decided to buy a new PS3 and that’s when our (insert sarcasm) wonderful journey began.

We checked availability on Amazon and Fry’s. The Fry’s web site claimed their Wilsonville store had them in stock so we decided to pick one up from there the next morning. I say Fry’s web site “claimed” to have some in stock, which was technically correct, but in reality they only had the demo model. Btw, the Fry’s sales guy hates their web site.

But this was only a minor setback because there’s a Gamestop just up the road from Fry’s so up the road we went. Unfortunately, and despite having PS3 ads plastered all over their windows, Gamestop had none in stock. The Gamestop clerk suggested we try Fry’s or Target. So we headed to Target next.

It only took 10 minutes or so to get to Target but we were too late. The sales guy there said he sold the last PS3 a half hour before we got there. But there was still hope because he informed us that their Target store in Mall 205 still had 2 left in stock. Now getting to Mall 205 for us is a bit of a trek and it was rush hour at this point but we had come this far and weren’t about to let a little traffic stop us. So up the freeway we go, stop, start, curse and finally reach Mall 205.

I should mention here that Target doesn’t hold merchandise for customers and they did have other inquiries on the PS3. We had hoped we’d be able to beat the crazed PS3 shoppers to the punch. But no! We missed the last one by 10 minutes! At this point we were really wondering what the deal was with the PS3 supply chain. Was there a sudden rush? It wasn’t anywhere near Christmas. Was Sony just not producing very many units? We didn’t know but we were gamely (pun intended) trying not to get discouraged.

We start cruising around Mall 205 but don’t see another possibility for a place that sells PS3 systems. So we head back down the freeway towards a Best Buy and a Toys-R-Us. We pop into Best Buy but they don’t have any in stock. The sales guy there said the distro center won’t send them. I started to suspect a conspiracy by this point .

So I get on the cell phone and have a buddy call around and check on some other stores. It was a no go for Toys-R-Us. Same for KMart. Same for Fred Meyer. From Best Buy we hop back into the car to cruise towards Sears and any other shops we spot along the way. Then lo and behold, we spot another Gamestop.

We enter the Gamestop and they have PS3 boxes stacked up. We were excited! I told Ken to grab one quick. He does and it’s an empty box. I was ready to kill the sales person on the spot . So the sales guy, not knowing his own peril, says they’re all out. We inquire about the nearby Walmart and he says nope, they’re out too and people have been coming from Walmart to his shop.

So, with hope almost totally lost, we went to Sears. My reasoning on Sears was that no self-respecting geeky gamer would be caught dead shopping at Sears . We enter Sears, ride up the escalator and browse around their electronics section but don’t see any game systems. Then a tall, bored sales guy comes up and offers to help. So Ken asks and he says “yea, they got 2 of them in an hour or so ago”. Ken’s response was “We are highly interested!” So the sales guy disappears for a bit and then gives us the sales ticket. We go over to pick-up and get our shiny new PS3 .

Various theories on why all these stores were out of stock on PS3 systems were presented to us. The Fred Meyers guy said something about a motion controller coming up for the PS3. I thought maybe it was the new Final Fantasy game that just came out. The Best Buy dude blamed the distro center. The Radio Shack guy, where we stopped by to get a USB thumb drive, said it’s trade issues with China. At the 1st Target we had stopped at, the customer that beat us by half an hour had their old Blu-ray drive fail. Maybe a whole bunch of Blu-ray drives failed around the same time on the old PS3 Phat systems, just like ours did.

Who knows. But if I had known it was going to be this crazy I would have just ordered it from Amazon .

Every once in a while I get the urge to revamp our web site. There are several approaches to accomplishing this including building it from scratch or utilizing and customizing existing tools. There are some very nice tools to help build web sites and I’m always open to time savers, especially when I have the source code and can tailor it to my needs. Enter Wordpress. I checked out several CMS website tools and ended up settling on Wordpress because it was easy to set up, modify and use. Wordpress is geared for blogs but works just fine as a simple CMS solution.

Generous people have made all sorts of plugins and themes to extend Wordpress. Our new look is based on a modified version of the Arjuna X theme. The cute little weather plugin comes from wp-forecast and I can see it’s going to keep raining, dangit

We’re planning on adding a Gallery section to share some of our photos and artwork. We may also continue to utilize this blog thing and make some additional posts