Free and Almost Free Geek Swag!

I got a package today from my pals over at Cranium. It included a comp copy of Hullabaloo, the game I exhaustively tested over there a while back with Karim and J.T., both of whom I worked with previously on Encarta. Apparently Hullabaloo won an Oppenheim Toy Portfolio Best Toy Award! I sure hope that the endless, mindless hours of hundreds of transcribed game sessions had something to do with that award. I haven’t had the heart to actually put the 3 AA batteries in the thing and fire it up. Maybe when Zoey’s 4…

Our new Netgear Wireless 4-Port Cable/DSL Router showed up today! I ripped it out of the box, swapped the ethernet cables for the workstation, server, and cable modem to the new router, plugged in the powercord, and stuck the unit up on the desk, where the laptop’s Netgear wireless card can hear the signal from the living room. The wired PCs recognized the new router right away, so I went in and fiddled with the settings in the router’s browser-based control panel to specify that only the laptop can connect wirelessly. A quick fiddling with the restarted laptop later, and voilá! About five minutes with no manual reading and we’ve got a secure wired + wireless network!

That means that my old Linksys router is now obsolete and unneeded, so it’s in the garage, awaiting an eventual eBay auction.

So, easy setup aside, the most important part about this router is how much it cost. The router’s "list price" was $99.99 but its Amazon.com price was $53.94. It features a $20 rebate, bringing the price down to $33.94. During the checkout process we were offered an Amazon.com Visa card, after instant approval of which we would be given an instant rebate of $30 off our order. That brought the total with tax, after we get the rebate check in 6 weeks or whenever, to $6.05. I used the associate link on the FrogTaco.com home page, earning a $2.70 referral fee. Of course, the order qualified for Free Super-Saver Shipping.

So really, our cool router will end up costing us three dollars and thirty-five cents.*

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* Unrelatedly, $3.35 is equal to Minimum Wage in Oregon in 1986, when I had my very first job as a delivery driver for Colonial Drug Store, as a Senior in high school. I didn’t even hear of the Internet for another 7 years after that, when Minimum Wage in Washington was around $4.75 or so.