The Other Fry's
Sure, you've got Amazon Prime. (I do too.) But I have something that (most of) you don't have: Fry's Electronics. It's a 12-mile drive from here, so I can't just dash over anytime I want, like I can to Artie's Ace Hardware. However, I realized after stopping in after a 15-year hiatus the other day that I need to go there more often.
Fry's is hard to describe. It's a double-big box store, done up in Aztec decor to look something like a pyramidal temple. It's the ultimate nerd supply house, and has everything you might expect: motherboards, memory sticks, power supplies, cases, monitors, hard drives, Flash drives, software, and so on. Want to build your own desktop? It's all there. However, Fry's is remarkable for going even deeper into the wild country of the word "electronics," right down to resistors and capacitors, soldering stations, shrink tubing and wire in any color you could name, and aluminum chassis. Good lord, they even have panel meters. Tools, wow: multitesters of every sort, needle-nose pliers, dykes (sorry; I still call them that), Dremels, Internet cable connector crimpers, and on for page upon page.
It gets a little nuts after that: toys, kites, CDs, DVDs, candy, all kinds of snacks, light bulbs, night lights, swamp coolers, refrigerators, camping gear, CB radios (!!), and fifteen varieties of fidget spinner. There was a display of something I truly don't understand: body shapers (which is I think the generic term for things like Spanx) printed to look like bluejeans. Yes, I know, there are plenty of women nerds...but underwear in a resistor shop?
Crazy world.
Why was I there? I've noticed over the past year that the Mozilla codebase has grown ever more memory-hungry. Waterfox has taken to gagging with just six or seven tabs open. I've been meaning to add more RAM to my quadcore for some time, on general principles. It started out as an XP machine, and so had a scant 4 GB since I bought it. Now I had an excuse. Windows 7 Pro 64-bit can manage 192 GB of RAM, so throwing 16 GB at it is no big deal. But since I dropped those sticks into the quad, I haven't heard the least little feep out of Waterfox.
Excellent prices, overwhelming selection, and people in the aisles who know what they're talking about. Still another expression of the boggling richness of Phoenix's retail sector. Fry's Electronics is legally unrelated to Fry's supermarkets, but was created by the sons of the man who founded the supermarket chain. If you're ever in town for some reason, make sure you go over there. If you do, call me and I'll come along.
Buy some hot pink shrink tubing. Dare ya!