No I don't want the service plan

I hate shopping at Best Buy now; I used to like it better than CompUSA because there's no restocking fee and aren't as condemning if you do ever return something, but they have really let this service plan garbage go to their heads. I understand that in some cases the service plan is helpful and I also understand that a lot of people don't know much about what they're purchasing and are easy prey for the service plan, but spending five minutes trying to convince me that I need a service plan all while I'm saying "No thanks I'm not interested" and variations of that phrase in the most polite ways possible does not make for a very pleasant shopping experience. I dread interacting with sales people at Best Buy for that very reason and now since they've moved to having the cashiers push the service plans on you I dread even paying for my purchases. I know it's not the fault of the sales people, I know that Best Buy puts a decent amount of pressure on them to push these service plans - so maybe it's time for the highers up at BB to recognize the type of environment they're creating at their stores. I used to love BB, but now I hate buying anything from there - it's been getting worse over the past couple of years and I think it's definitely hit new lows.

Anyways, I was down at Best Buy picking up some more copies of Doom 3 as well as a 5.1 setup for Derek's upcoming Doom 3 Sound Guide.

I've managed to actually play some Doom 3 during Doom 3 week, which is harder than you'd think. See after benchmarking for several hours I'd take a break, walk around the house, grab a drink of water and sometimes go upstairs to play a game or two. During that time I'd usually play Doom 3, which seemed to run soooo slow on the 9800 Pro I was playing on (isn't that sad?). The game itself is a lot of fun, but it honestly scares the hell out of me. It doesn't take much to startle me, and Doom 3 is definitely more than enough. I've been playing on a regular monitor with a 2.1 speaker setup ever since I got the game, but I'm contemplating hooking a 6800 Ultra system to my TV and playing using my home theater setup. I'm pretty sure that's the most immersive experience I could get, and I'm also pretty sure that it will result in some form of cardiac arrest. I may give that a try later tonight :)

Despite my fascination with Doom 3 I'm far from a horror-film fan, I can't stand anything that is designed to scare me. Maybe it's the shadowing or the fact that unlike in a horror film I've got a gun in Doom 3 that gives me the ability to deal with scariness factor a bit better :)

I gotta run to a NVIDIA meeting, I'll post more later...

Take care.