Forced upgrade to cooler toys – Part II

It was only a matter of time, anyway. For the past six or eight months I’ve been primarily using an old Toshiba Portege 7020ct as my primary computing source, desipite my Christmas purchase of a newly-minted Dimension 4300 1.8ghz P4. The toshiba is lighter, easier to carry around, and since the addition of the wireless network at apartment C4, it’s made the 4300 a little stodgy and redundant. So given this arrangement I have become dependant on having a mobile way to compute.

Unfortunately, the Toshiba passed on Wednesday night. All seemed to be normal at first, but then the hard drive started thrashing about like it was wounded in some way. I shut it down manually by turning off the power and disconnecting the battery. I took a deep breath. I restarted the machine. No dice.

Sooooo… Since I had already decided to purchase a laptop in December, I just moved my timetable up a bit and take the plunge. It’ll be pretty cool.

At first it was a compliment…

When we drove up to the rental car guy we thought he paid us a compliment when he said, “No one from Tennessee would ever steal a car.” It made me think that all over this great country of ours, Tennessee is respected for the quality of her people. Until he said, “A horse, maybe.”

Damn yankee.

Forced upgrade to cooler toys

So I’ll admit I’m a gadget person, I’m always craving the latest toy or dingus, but this time it wasn’t me who wanted to upgrade. For the longest time now I’ve had a venerable Motorola StarTac that was fine for my mobile phoning needs. But alas, everything must come to an end, and the transmitter or somewhatever piece of internal circuitry went kaput. I’m actually a little suspicious of Verizon in general, because I had taken the StarTac in last week for them to look at it, they upgraded the firmware and handed it back to me and it was fine… It wasn’t. The next week I took it back, they did a more thourough inspection, and lo and behold, a busted phone. They told me it would be 150 dollars to fix it. So they went and told me to look for a new phone. I went to look at the choices, and much to my surprise, and much to my dismay, they had removed the StarTac display that had greeted mobile phone users for years. “Discontinued,” they told me. They had them for sale for 50 dollars when I took the phone in the first time.

Bottom line, if they had really inspected my phone the first time, I would only be out 50 bucks (the reduced price of the remaining StarTacs). Instead, I’m out $200, and all the accessories (the car charger, the desk charger, the hands-free kit, the blender attachment). I don’t think you can even get a blender attachment for the new phone.

But the new phone is pretty cool.

Those Special People

I had the good fortune tonight to dine at one of my favorite establishments, Cracker Barrel. As I walked in, I noticed that the man in front of me was still smoking his cigarette. He brazenly approached the hostess and asked for a table for three…smoking. I just shook my head and thought to myself, “Gee, sir, you must be pretty special to just be able to ignore all of the rules of civilized society at will.” I pointed this out to my friend Michael, who added “I wonder if he would like me to pull his car around to the handicapped space out front, too?”

As we were leaving we saw the man get into his car.

His car that was parked in the handicapped space out front.