Yesterday I had Thanksgiving dinner at Tom and Jo’s place, who are a couple from church. They are probably the nicest people I’ve met since moving to the east coast. The world would be a much better place if we had more people like them… especially since they always seem to feed me

What do people here do after gorging themselves on food? Apparently they go shopping the next day in what is known as Black Friday. Yup, the Christmas retail madness is officially upon us. Good luck with parking.

So I gave in and went shopping for a bit today at Pentagon City, which is a mall near my apartment. Best Buy was pretty busy and they had some pretty nice deals, like a 120 gig HD for $30 (after rebates, ugh). Unfortunately, they had no more XBox 360s. I’m kicking myself for not pre-ordering at least one to resell, since they’re now going for close to $1000 each on eBay. That’s about a $600 markup, for those keeping score. Oh well.

I also went to the Apple store and picked up an Airport Express for something like 25% off. Sweet. Apple hardly ever has sales, so Black Friday is really the only time to buy new Apple gear at a discount. I think Sony is really starting to lose it’s mojo. One thing I noted was that even though the Sony Store was right next to the Apple Store in the mall, the Apple Store was something like 5 times as busy. There was even a news camera crew filming people inside the Apple Store for what I assumed would be for the evening news segment. So you might see me on TV at the cash register checking out, since the camera guy was filming me doing that :p This could be my 15 minutes 30 seconds of fame.

PS: I made a small update to my Flickr Post Bar plugin for Wordpress. Let me know if you have any problems with it (via email please!).