Chapel Hill Road Trip

I took a short road trip up to Chapel Hill this weekend, looking for a place to live for the fall. It was not a success. One of the other physical oceanography grads had a place that was a fantastic location, within easy walking distance of the department, but it was just too small and, frankly, too much of a dump.

In the process I discovered that it was a sales tax holiday for back-to-school, and remembered that I need to buy a laptop. I stopped by Best Buy but it was a zoo, so I decided to order one from Dell. In the process of researching the sales tax holiday on the web I found where Dell offers NC state employees a 12% discount, so I had that going for me too. The tax holiday and the discount together came to about $300, so I got a pretty hot laptop for under $1500. I do need to contact Dell's tax department to get that straightened out, though, because the web site ordering system wasn't aware of the holiday.