Jon's blog

I recently came to purchase a Microsoft Wireless Notebook Optical Mouse as an open-box item from a local Target for the low-low-discount price of $8.97.

So, after going through a drought of no internet access at home, I tried NetZero. Their 10 hours per month of free service with banner and popup ads sux, but it worked on a spare celery stick, until I decided I had to get away from the constant cycle of Orbitz - Monster.com - NetZero - Get Free $tuff!! Ads. I paid 'em the $9.95 and now I can use their service with my iBook. Of course it needs theri dialer, but some ursory examination leads me to think that they are using SLIP istead of PPP. I'd dearly love a PPP dial-up so that other machines (BSD, old Mac OS, Amiga, whatever) could get on too. The PPP dial-up I used to use worked on everything from my old A2000 to my old WinCE 2.0 palmtop to my old IIci the used to run NetBSD and act as a LAN <-> dial-up gateway to my iBook. Oh well. Back on the grid I guess. One day I'll have me a Mac mini. One day soon, I swear, even if I have to save a $10 or $20 bill per week to do it. It'd be the first new Mac I can buy outright, and only the 4th computer I'd have bought new. I bought a Packard Bell Statesman laptop on clearance from Wal-Mart years ago for $500. I bought the Everex Freestyle A10 PPC on a post-christmas sale for $100 or so, I bought the iBook on a student discount for about $1200, and I'm still paying on it, and I still owe at least twice what it's worth. I'd love to be able to just walk into the Apple Store down on the Country Club Plaza and drop 5 Benjamins and change and walk out with my Mac mini. It would feel so cool, as long as I didn't get mugged by any of the too-cool-to-be-there trendy-ites to steal my new hardware.

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.