Conspiracy Theory:

One of my coworkers bought a laptop at CompUSA two days ago and what an ordeal it was. It took her 3 tries to actually purchase the thing. The first time, the salesperson forgot to include the wireless router in the ticket, so she had to return it and repurchase it...then the sales tax was wrong...so again she had to return it and repurchase it...then the rebate form didn't print out because the salesperson had given her the wrong model of router, so she had to return and repurchase it a third time...

I would consider this an anomaly had not something similar happened to me when I bought my laptop from CompUSA 6 months prior.

After purchasing my laptop, I submitted the rebate forms along with the receipts that I had. Several months passed by and I got a postcard in the mail stating that my request for a rebate had been denied because I did not have proof that I had purchased a laptop.

I'm waiting to see what happens with my friend's rebate, but I'm thinking that CompUSA may be intentionally screwing up sales so as to thwart rebate requests...far out, I know, but possible? Who knows...In any case, I know not to go to CompUSA for my next laptop...

Visual Studio 2005 is awesome! I've been dabbling with it for a couple of days now and really like the new "MASTER page" feature. Master pages allow you to create templates which can be inherited by multiple pages.

The way that VS 2005 handles compiled pages has changed and was a bit confusing at first. You can't just compile then copy the contents of the BIN directory to your public web site as you could with VS 2003...there is a new "Publish" menu option that compiles your web site to a seperate directory. Once in published form, your web site can then be copied to the public location.