Blogs

After a small fiasco with the phone company(s) we've got phone service back on. It never should have been turned off, but we can't all prevent corporate mismanagement of customer requests...

Anyway, aside from working quite a bit, our car got wrecked. A guy turned across two oncoming lanes of traffic and it just so happens that I was on the outside lane doing 30-35mph. I had about 50ft to stop. Needless to say, the only reason the car stopped was because his van provided a nice solid inertial dampener. THe car was ruled totalled, and they offered us only $3000 for a 1997 Plymouth Breeze with only 80k miles. That was after they took off a few hundred dollars for "prior damage". Huh? A shopping cart ding on one side (a no paint repair and it can only be seen in the right light) and a smaller ding on the front fender? The adjuster told me that no "average" condition car would have ANY dents on it. Of course, I called major BS, and when they gave us the list of 3 comparable cars, I went and looked at one. Sure enough it was in much more rough shape than mine, with two dings, and foot long scratch and RUST in various places and a a crappy interior with 16,000 more miles. My car would be in perfect shape after a detail job and those two dings (and the wreck). The car was in GREAT shape. So, after pissing off the adjuster because I researched everything he sent me, I finally got him talked up to about $3750. Still a bit low, but not bottom of the barrel pricing for a car in such good shape. One of my major arguing poits was that I couldn't even go buy the cheapest comp. with the money they were offering me, and it was in worse shape! I made the big point that the money was supposed to buy me a close as possible identical replacement for my car, and I couldn't do that because he was trying to screw over the 25y/o couple with a baby. I patiently waited over a month to get our money, and the guy was getting more and more difficult to work with because everytime he made us an offer, I was abole to prove he was wrong. I talked him up on price 3 seperate times, using his own data. What a goon.

A funny computer story for those who have a lot of systems and parts pass through their homes...

I went looking for a used laser printer or toner cartridge. My Laserwriter 16/600 was having some printing problems, and occasionally I'll see a printer for sale for far less than the cost of a toner cartridge.

well i recently received a powermac 7500 salagedfrom a dumpster. After a close inspection it looks in absolutely great condition, after pluging it in and turning the on button, i heard the all too familiar beep and thats as far as i get to go. Unfortuenty i have no video adapter and so i cant really use a monitor, and my keyboard and mouse are away at a different house. So, with this in mind it looks like a good find, and i may use it for 9.1 or maybe yellowdog linux and set it up as a folding box. On that note i have been tinkering with my old clamshell and am trying to load some yellow dog onto that as well. Unfortunetly i am having some major problems with the iso files and getting them onto CDs, using my main rig (windoze) i burned the isos, but the ibook wouldnt read em, so i burned the iso file to a cd-rw and threw it into my dual USB to burn it on there, after copying the file to my harddrive and seetting thing up to burn, things finnaly were looking up, i started burning the iso to a blank CDR and bang, i got an error while burning. I blame it on the iso, so i try and coppy it onto the CDR again, no luck... eh well, i'm redownloading the iso onto the mac, hopefully things will be better tommorow... i hope