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Oct. 24th, 2003 12:33 amI guess it's all about money today. Money and Stuff.
1. I'm in the market for a new PDA. I replaced the Visor's digitizer just about a month ago (lj here), and the new (scrounged, actually) one broke in almost exactly the same way, sometime last Friday afternoon. The graffiti area and the bottom of the display are covered with cracks. The digitizer works fine above that area, and I can sometimes get to the app launcher, but I can't do anything useful with it.
I'm cheap, my needs are simple, and I'm not a gadget fiend, which adds up to I don't want to spend a lot of money. I don't need a camera, I don't need wireless, I don't need a phone, I don't need an mp3 player - I've got other devices for all of that.
My only firm requirements are:
2. I got an $814.02 brake job today. Front and rear rotors and pads, and one rear caliper. My car wasn't driven for 2 months this summer, while I was biking, and the rear rotors rusted pretty badly. The rest of it was wear-and-tear; it's been a while since my last brake job, and I think the caliper was original (almost 10 years old). It's a lot of money, but I'm not making car payments, and it's a hell of a lot less than the $1200 the dealer quoted me. Go local mechanics!
3. Cooke's called today to say that my skating boots were in. Pity that I can't get down there to get them fitted before Saturday morning's lesson. Maybe I'll go to the Sunday afternoon practice session. They're something like $265 + tax, but I'm actually excited about having real figure skates, fitted and formed to my own feet.
I spent about that much on my mountain bike (the first bike I ever bought new), but all that means is that I got a cheap bike. I used to ride it around town with the child seat on the back, and I rode it down to Philadelphia for MilPhil, but I haven't ridden it at all this year, and maybe not last year. I paid $700 for the touring bike that I took cross country, which is still inexpensive for a bike. It's actually made for touring, and it has the hitch for the Trail-a-Bike.
I was willing to lay down that sort of money, because I knew I was a biker, and I knew what kind of biking I wanted to do. When I started skating last year, I wasn't a skater, and I didn't know what kind of skating I wanted to do. So now I've got a redundant bike, and a redundant pair of skates, but somehow, that's okay.
And I'm hoping for a cold, dry winter, so I can skate on the ponds around here.
3½. Not about Money or Stuff, but I can't let it go without mentioning that Cooke's web shite is Exhibit A in how you can build just as crappy a website in FrontPage as in emacs and raw html. The company name blinks, for Christ's sake. The text is a mish-mash of different alignments and sizes. (This is an area where tools like FrontPage make it immensely easier to fuck up; it takes a certain level of knowledge and intent to add a fucked-up font tag in raw html.) The nav bar is sometimes above the text, sometimes below. Some pages have prev/next buttons, some don't. The logo is Lame, but it's the same lame logo they've had since 1963, so we can't blame FrontPage for that.
4. Francie's most recent employers, the ones who laid her off in February, want to hire her back at 20 hours and no benefits. Or maybe. It's been a week, and they still haven't made a written offer. It's some weird political and/or bureaucratic thing, and the hiring manager can't do anything about it. Parenthetically, I used to think FTP was incredibly dysfunctional. I've since come to realize that all companies, of all sizes, are dysfunctional.
1. I'm in the market for a new PDA. I replaced the Visor's digitizer just about a month ago (lj here), and the new (scrounged, actually) one broke in almost exactly the same way, sometime last Friday afternoon. The graffiti area and the bottom of the display are covered with cracks. The digitizer works fine above that area, and I can sometimes get to the app launcher, but I can't do anything useful with it.
I'm cheap, my needs are simple, and I'm not a gadget fiend, which adds up to I don't want to spend a lot of money. I don't need a camera, I don't need wireless, I don't need a phone, I don't need an mp3 player - I've got other devices for all of that.
My only firm requirements are:
- I'm going to Stick It In My Pocket, and it has to be able to survive that. Aluminum case seems like it would be a better bet, but maybe they've started using tempered glass in the 4 years since my Visor was manufactured.
- I have to be able to back it up (and restore) without hot-synching. I bought a backup module for the Visor after it hard-crashed en route to California. I know the Sonys have Memory Stick, dunno about the others,
- It must not require the cradle to charge the batteries. Or if it does, the cradle is small and has a separate power connection. I don't want to take the cradle with me when I travel.
- PalmOS, not Windows.
2. I got an $814.02 brake job today. Front and rear rotors and pads, and one rear caliper. My car wasn't driven for 2 months this summer, while I was biking, and the rear rotors rusted pretty badly. The rest of it was wear-and-tear; it's been a while since my last brake job, and I think the caliper was original (almost 10 years old). It's a lot of money, but I'm not making car payments, and it's a hell of a lot less than the $1200 the dealer quoted me. Go local mechanics!
3. Cooke's called today to say that my skating boots were in. Pity that I can't get down there to get them fitted before Saturday morning's lesson. Maybe I'll go to the Sunday afternoon practice session. They're something like $265 + tax, but I'm actually excited about having real figure skates, fitted and formed to my own feet.
I spent about that much on my mountain bike (the first bike I ever bought new), but all that means is that I got a cheap bike. I used to ride it around town with the child seat on the back, and I rode it down to Philadelphia for MilPhil, but I haven't ridden it at all this year, and maybe not last year. I paid $700 for the touring bike that I took cross country, which is still inexpensive for a bike. It's actually made for touring, and it has the hitch for the Trail-a-Bike.
I was willing to lay down that sort of money, because I knew I was a biker, and I knew what kind of biking I wanted to do. When I started skating last year, I wasn't a skater, and I didn't know what kind of skating I wanted to do. So now I've got a redundant bike, and a redundant pair of skates, but somehow, that's okay.
And I'm hoping for a cold, dry winter, so I can skate on the ponds around here.
3½. Not about Money or Stuff, but I can't let it go without mentioning that Cooke's web shite is Exhibit A in how you can build just as crappy a website in FrontPage as in emacs and raw html. The company name blinks, for Christ's sake. The text is a mish-mash of different alignments and sizes. (This is an area where tools like FrontPage make it immensely easier to fuck up; it takes a certain level of knowledge and intent to add a fucked-up font tag in raw html.) The nav bar is sometimes above the text, sometimes below. Some pages have prev/next buttons, some don't. The logo is Lame, but it's the same lame logo they've had since 1963, so we can't blame FrontPage for that.
4. Francie's most recent employers, the ones who laid her off in February, want to hire her back at 20 hours and no benefits. Or maybe. It's been a week, and they still haven't made a written offer. It's some weird political and/or bureaucratic thing, and the hiring manager can't do anything about it. Parenthetically, I used to think FTP was incredibly dysfunctional. I've since come to realize that all companies, of all sizes, are dysfunctional.
