Ridiculous fifth-grade name aside, I suppose this is a big day. Not for me, however. This morning I drove Jessi over to our polling place to vote in the primaries before work. I suspected it wouldn’t really work, but I decided to go in and see about voting myself. My name was in the rolls, but rather than the familiar D, R, G, W, or, apparently, U next to my name there was a very cryptic and unknown symbol: L

‘L, what’s L?’, said the woman checking people off in the book. ‘Do you know what L is?’ The gentleman next to her mused, ‘L? Liberal? That’s Democrat, right?’. My clarification that L stood for Libertarian didn’t really clear things up very much, and they ended up having to make a phone call to …someone who told them that there was no Libertarian ballot and that I wasn’t eligible to vote. I figured this was probably the case as I hadn’t heard anything from either the state or national party about primaries, but it was disappointing none the less, especially as we have a local, George Phillies of Worcester, in the running for the LP presidential nomination. Phillies also happens to be my favorite candidate for President being not only a Libertarian, but a science fiction author and college professor as well. With any luck he’ll get the nomination and I’ll actually get a candidate that I want to vote for this time around (in ‘04 none of the candidates I liked got their respective nominations: Dean, Nolan, McCain; I’m not longer a McCain supporter however so his likely nomination this year doesn’t really help things). Oh well, at least I won’t be barred from voting in November.

Which brings me to another topic I’ve been meaning to discuss: a particular ballot question. Come November there will be a rather important question on the ballot, the question of whether or not to end the Massachusetts state income tax. If you check out their website it sounds like they actually have a decent chance of passing this. It was on the ballot before in ‘02 and just barely failed with only 45.3% of the vote. That was with very little publicity and the media presenting it as a cause that couldn’t possibly succeed. However with that strong a showing in ‘02, no one can claim this time around that it has no chance. It very clearly has a chance, and therefore media reaction to it has been a little more positive this year. They’re also investing a lot more in publicity to spread awareness, so I think there’s a very good chance this might pass in November.

That said, I don’t want it to, I think we should keep the income tax. Well, that’s not entirely true either, I don’t want the income tax, but I think that repealing it right now is the wrong thing to do. This is Massachusetts, after all, and with a democratic legislature and Deval Patrick in the Governor’s office I find it unlikely that, even given an $11b drop in tax revenue, the state is going to put the brakes on any spending. Instead they’ll just look for different ways to bring in money like increasing the sales tax, increasing fees, and just generally taxing more things. One area where spending is probably likely to fall, however, is local aid. A lot of the cities and towns of Massachusetts are already suffering from anemic income and getting very little help from the state. This clearly isn’t going to improve if we stop giving the state part of our paychecks. So how are those municipalities going to keep making ends meet? Easy, they’ll keep doing what they always do and raise property taxes. I pay enough in property taxes as it is (about three times more each quarter than Jessi’s mom in Illinois pays in a year), and I find property taxes to be by far the more egregious kind of tax.

Think about what it means to have to pay property tax. Essentially, it means that you can never actually own property. In all but name, the State owns your property and you merely rent it from them. Don’t believe me? Try not paying your property taxes and see what happens: the same thing that happens if you stop paying your rent. You have to pay for the privilege of living on your own land! I say that rather than repealing the income tax, by far the better thing to do would be to repeal property taxes. This would a) strengthen the right of people to own property, b) reduce the cost of living significantly by lowering rent as well, and therefore c) reduce the prices of goods and services by lowering the costs for the providers and sellers.

Now, maybe repealing the income tax would actually be successful. Maybe next year we’d get a budget that was $11b lighter (wasn’t that one of Patrick’s campaign promises anyway?). Maybe Massachusetts will implement something like the FairTax on a state level, and prove one and for all that either it can work or it can’t. Probably not, but one can hope. Regardless, I think our first priority should be repealing property taxes. I would much rather see that happen, and I think it’s a revenue loss that could be more easily and quickly accommodated (rent assistance payouts, for example, would suddenly become much lower which would free up more money for local aid to compensate). But we’ll see what happens in November. I may even vote in favor of repealing the income tax just on principle; if it passes and our legislature and governor surprise me by taking it in stride there could still be some good that comes of it.

For the week leading up to Christmas, Jessi and I were in New Mexico with my mom. Flying to New Mexico is a somewhat ridiculous affair, because there aren’t all that many direct flights to Albuquerque. In general, the best bet has always been to fly Southwest. I’ve never been a particularly big fan of Southwest, but it wasn’t that big a deal because I was only ever taking short flights (Oakland to San Diego, Oakland to Albuquerque, and Oakland to Los Angeles, were about it). Now, of course, I’m living on the East Coast again, so not only did I have to drive an hour to get to an airport that Southwest operates out of (they fly to Providence and Manchester, we chose Manchester for this trip), but there weren’t any direct flights. It wasn’t really all that bad though, as long as I have a book and an aisle seat so I can stretch my legs every so often I can deal with it.

The real problem arose after we got back to Manchester. We came back with an extra suitcase that we hadn’t taken with us, so had 3 checked bags instead of 2. Unfortunately, only 2 of them actually made it to Manchester—the two that had only my stuff in them. Jessi’s bag was nowhere to be found. So we filed a claim in the baggage office and they assumed that it was just stuck in Chicago (where we had caught our connecting flight) and would come in the next day (yesterday) at which point they would send it to us by courier.

So yesterday I spent the day waiting for the courier. He finally arrive in the early afternoon and brought in a suitcase. Unfortunately it wasn’t ours. It wasn’t even the right color, although someone had thoughtfully tagged it with our baggage claim number. The courier was very apologetic, although also very happy when I didn’t blame him for the problem; apparently he gets yelled at a lot when that sort of thing happens even though all he does it take the bags where the airlines tell him to take them. We figured what probably had happened was that the tags on two bags got switched some how, so he had dropped our bag off at someone else’s house (if it’s not an apartment you can have them just leave the bag for you), so I figured we’d get a call about it that night when the people got home from work and discovered the mistake. No such luck.

So last night I got a call from Southwest. They confirmed that the bag that had been delivered was the wrong one, and then basically just said that they have no idea where our bag is. I repeated the description of the bag that I had given them before and let them know that it had one of Jessi’s business cards in the name tag holder and that all the contact information on it was valid.

Now we’re essentially just waiting for Southwest to conduct some sort of national search for our bag. Maybe it’s still in Albuquerque, maybe it’s still in Chicago, maybe it’s still in Manchester somehow. Maybe it got put onto the wrong flight at some point and ended up somewhere altogether different. Maybe a baggage handler stole it. Maybe the TSA stole it. Who knows (although I’m leaning towards the TSA being to blame just because).

I’ve never actually had a bag get lost on a flight before, it’s not a very fun experience. It also does little to improve our perception of Southwest. We don’t really plan on ever flying with them again, although New Mexico is the only destination of theirs that we’d even have considered them for anyway.

Never fear, my fellow Americans, our borders are secure! So secure, in fact, that a law abiding US citizen traveling home from a friendly nation with which we have very good relations can barely get into the country. Ok, that’s a bit of an exaggeration, but that’s what it felt like. I had a great business-related post all planned out for when I got back, but now I feel inclined to post about this instead.

As you should know if you’ve been paying attention, I’ve just come back from Jamaica where I was for my uncle’s wedding. I’ve been to Jamaica tons of times; I started going from before my memory starts, and there are pictures of me there in diapers. I’ve had plenty of annoying trips going through customs and immigration (usually in Miami), but this time definitely takes the cake.

There aren’t, apparently, any direct flights from Boston to Montego Bay, so instead I flew JetBlue to Ft. Lauderdale where I caught an Air Jamaica flight to Montego Bay. Coming back I simply reversed the trip.

As an interesting aside, when I was buying my tickets I discovered this:

Apparently the USSR is still alive and well, but you can only get there through Jamaica.

Anyway, back to the point. My schedule gave me an hour and a half between my two flights in Ft. Lauderdale. I have never had immigration take that long (except maybe going into Manchester this past spring…), even going into China has always been a breeze when I’ve done it, so I figured I’d be fine.

The first problem was that they were simply unorganized. The passport control area was designed have probably about 10 lines all feeding different desks. Instead, they had set it up as one single long line that snaked through the room (because it was way too small to accommodate even a single flight’s worth of travelers despite having obviously been renovated pretty recently). They didn’t even separate out the US passport holders from the rest, which would have completely solved my problem. 45 minutes later I was less than halfway through the line because, despite it being incredibly obvious to anyone that their setup wasn’t sufficient to accommodate even a modest number of people, only about half of the desks were actually staffed. About an hour later I finally made it through, picked up my bag, went through customs (very quickly, thankfully), then got on the shuttle to take me to the other terminal where I’d catch my next flight. At that point there was only about 30 minutes before my flight boarded which essentially meant that I couldn’t make it. First off, they won’t let you check in less than 30 minutes before the flight (and I hadn’t checked in online before, which turned out to be a good thing), and second it’s very rare to spend less than a half hour going through security. Fortunately, I had a solution. Since my flight hadn’t actually left yet and probably wasn’t even boarding yet I hadn’t technically missed it yet. That meant that, while I was on the (surprisingly long) shuttle ride between terminals I was able to go online with my iPhone and change my itinerary to a later flight. JetBlue is very good about changing itineraries, and they only charge you the difference in the ticket price (if any) plus about $25 service charge. So when I got off the shuttle, all I had to do was check into my next flight and go through security. Security, as I expected, probably took about 45 minutes to an hour because, again, they didn’t have enough people working causing a huge bottle neck so there was no way I could possibly have made my flight.

So I bought some books, and waited 4 hours for my flight. I ended up leaving just a little after I was supposed to arrive in Boston originally, and landed in Boston at around 10:30 at night. Fortunately, Jessi was there to pick me up so I didn’t have to deal with the vagaries of the T nor the exorbitance of a taxi.

Despite all that though, I had a great time in Jamaica. I got to spend time with my family that I rarely see, and meet some interesting new people. I also was able to get a few good pictures that I’ll be posting online once I figure out how to get them onto my computer (I used to just use the built-in card reader in my monitor which I no longer have, and I’m not sure where the cord for my camera got to).

So, that’s my border crossing rant. Stay tuned for that business-related post I promised earlier.

Treehugger just posted a quote about the relative efficiencies of various modes of transportation. Basically, biking is the most efficient way for you to get around. Walking comes in 2nd, then trains, then cars. This is hardly news for anyone who pays attention to such things, but I think it’s still worth pointing out.

Boston is America’s walking city, and it’s true that this city is very friendly to walking. Sure it may be a bit of a hike from the North End to Kenmore Square, but it’s certainly within the realm of possibility, and the more you do it the easier it will be. Really, unless you’re making a delivery there’s very little reason not to walk everywhere in Boston. Even when I was living in Central Square I’d often make the walk across the river into Boston to go to the Boston Public Library. But really, what we should be is America’s biking city (currently Sparta, Wisconsin is the Bicycle Capital of America; I say we should take that title). Not only is biking more efficient than walking, but it’s much faster as well. The walk from here in Somerville to Boston is a little more than I’d want to undertake on a regular basis (though I’ve done it once or twice). With a bike, however, Boston suddenly become mere minutes away. It takes me about 30 minutes to bike at a fairly leasurely pace from Porter Square to the Broadway Red Line stop in Southie. According to the MBTA it takes the Red Line 20 minutes to make the same trip, and that’s if the T’s being friendly that day. On average, I’d say biking that route is as fast or faster than taking the T. To drive that same route, according to Google maps, would also take 20 minutes, though that doesn’t account for traffic (and Google says it could take up to 30 minutes with traffic, though on some days it would certainly take even longer). It also doesn’t take into account the amount of time it takes to find parking. Some days it could take just as long to find parking as to drive there.

So not only is biking more efficient, it is easily just as fast and often faster than taking the T or even driving. When you’re talking about the shorter distances actually within Boston (say from the South End to the Financial District or Fenway to Copley Square) the advantages of biking will just be magnified. With those shorter distances the small amount of time it takes for you to walk to the T station and wait for the train, or to walk to your car and then deal with traffic, become even more significant. With a bike, you just get on and go and can, for the most part, ignore traffic.

Biking is cheaper too. I got my bike for $10 off of Craigslist. It was in good enough condition when I bought it, though not perfect. For $20 I probably could have gotten a bike that was in perfect condition. But even if I had gone and bought a brand new, top of the line bike, I could have gotten one for as little as $1500, and most people would be more than happy with a $300 or less bike. Once you make that initial investment for the bike, helmet, bike lock, and maybe saddle bags to carry your stuff and some lights for biking at night you’ve still spent very little money. And when biking you don’t have to worry about paying for parking or paying for T fare.

Even at longer distances, biking can make sense. When Jessi was working in Lexington she could still bike to work. The Minuteman Bikeway goes from right here in Somerville straight to Lexington and beyond. It’s about an 8 mile ride from here to Lexington, which takes 30-45 minutes depending on your speed. Public transportation requires you to take the T and then transfer to a bus which actually takes longer than biking. So she could leave later and still get to work on time all while getting some exercise. Really, if you ask me, biking is the ideal form of transportation for Boston, or most cities for that matter. Obviously it won’t work so well for everyone, but it does for a whole lot of people who probably never even considered it.

The only drawback to biking is the weather. Biking isn’t so much fun in the winter. But even if you take the T or drive in the winter and bike the rest of the year you’re still going to be saving a ton of money and getting a lot more exercise all at the same time.

For me, my bike is my favored form of transport. Weather permitting, I’ll use it over any other method. Of course I do have a bit of an advantage in that I do all my own work on it which means I can keep it in tip top condition for no cost other than the occasional replacement parts. But if you want to keep your bike in good condition without getting your hands dirty and without spending a fortune on over-priced maintenance, I highly recommend you take it to Quad Bikes. They’re a non-profit bike shop that services the Harvard Community and does all the work on the Harvard Police Departments bike fleet. I also happen to volunteer there in my free time, which is something else I’d recommend to people interested in bikes. Their volunteer program is great, basically they just teach how to work on bikes by having you work on bikes. After a few weeks there you’ll be competent and confident enough to do all the basic work on your own bike, and you’ll have a great resource in the people who work there to help you with the more complex stuff. Plus, they have all the tools so you don’t need to buy your own. And they rescue and refurbish old bikes so you can get a great deal on a perfectly serviceable bike. Or even, if you wanted, get a bike custom built for you. As an additional benefit, I find that getting my hands dirty and actually producing tangible results (unlike web development, which offers it’s own rewards to be sure) is extremely satisfying. It’s a great way to relax, unwind, and still get something productive done.

Currently my main computer setup is a PowerMac G5 with a 24″ Dell monitor. It’s a great computer, but is getting to be a bit dated. So this afternoon I listed it on Craigslist. My plan was, if I can sell it for enough, to replace it with a 24″ C2D iMac. So far I’ve gotten one offer that’s very different from what I was expecting, but has filled my head with all sorts of fun and tempting ideas.

The offer was from a guy who works for US Airways. As a US Airways employee he basically gets unlimited free flights whenever he wants them. He also gets a companion pass so that other people can fly with him. Apparently the holder of this pass doesn’t need to fly with him, so he can just give it to someone and they can fly for free. His offer was to give me one calendar year of unlimited free flights in exchange for my computer system.

Obviously a year of free flights won’t pay for a new iMac, but it gave me an idea. If I took this, I could spend the year being, basically, an air-hobo. If I wanted to be really hardcore about it I could spend the year sleeping in airports and eating nothing but airplane food, but I think I’d probably end up missing out on a lot of fun opportunities that way. But think of it this way: there are 52 weeks in the year and 50 states in the union. I could spend just over a week in every single state. But how would I pay for food? Not to mention our mortgage and bills. Well, I could blog about it.

There’s plenty of interest in travel blogs, and this would certainly be a travel blog with a twist. Might it be able to generate enough traffic and interest that I could make enough money off it for a year? It may well be able to. Maybe I could even get US Airways to sponsor me somehow to help make it doable, or a hotel chain to do so and give me a place to stay during my travels.

At first I just dismissed the offer out of hand. But travel is absolutely my favorite thing to do, and the more I think about it, the more tempting it is. (I actually even considered trying to do something similar on my own without the free flights after college.) I was just going to delete the email, but now I’m seriously considering calling the guy and getting more details on the limitations of this pass. This could be very interesting and very fun. And Jessi’s already given it the green light. So if I can figure out some way for this whole thing to be financially viable, I just might do it. The money thing, of course, is the limiting factor here, so I leave this with a question for you: should I do it?

I’ve been getting bad about updating regularly, and I’m trying to fix that. I have, however, been very busy lately. Here’s a quick rehash of what’s happened since my last post:

1. It turned out that the work I was expecting to have to do while I was in Illinois ended up getting pushed back by my client. So I never really had to test out my Parallels/Gentoo/Lighttpd/SQLite setup for web development (although I did some very basic tests that worked out just fine).



2. I got to meet Jessi’s sister’s new daughter, and basically my niece, Maura, just hours after she was born at around midnight on Sept. 28. Here are some pictures of her meeting her aunt Jessi, her grandma, her great-grandma, her mom, and, of course, me, all taken on my iPhone (the one to the right is my favorite of the many funny faces she made).
3. Went to the wedding of some of Jessi’s friends from home.
4. Flew back to Boston.
5. Had a whopping 4 or so days before some other friends came from Illinois to visit us, and then got to show them around Boston and expose them to some of our favorite things here (like G’vanni’s in the North End and Tacos Lupita in Porter Square). Though in the process it finally dawned on me that since we have a car now the Providence and Manchester airports are within range so we can actually fly on SouthWest and save some money when we go places that JetBlue won’t take us (they flew SouthWest into Providence).
6. Finally sold the Mercedes. I didn’t get quite as much for it as I wanted, but I still got enough that it was worthwhile having repaired and sold it rather than just junking it when it died.
7. Finally got that project that I had expected to be working on while I was in Illinois. Ended up having to do the whole thing in two days (ah, the joys of sub-contracting).
8. I lived out my 9,125 day, remarkable only in that it’s a multiple of 365. This was the same day we ate at G’vanni’s, and afterwards got pastries from the North End’s Modern Pastry.
9. I put off development of my WiFi database site in favor of a different project. This one will be less flashy, but will have much greater personal utility. It will also probably be useful for a lot of other people too, so my plan is to make it a hosted (free) service and open it up for anyone to use. I’m considering the possibility of maybe some premium features that you have to pay for, but that will have to wait.
10. My MacBook, which I’ve had for approximately 17 months now, died. I’m fairly positive it’s a hard drive failure as when it happened there was no kernel panic or any other sort of error message. The computer was still running, but any processes that were trying to access the hard drive locked up. Then the hard drive started making a pleasant clicking sound. Upon attempting to reboot I sill get the starting chime, but then it just goes to a white screen and clicks. This all seems consistent with a hard drive failure as when it happened most of the system would have been running in RAM and so unaffected, and the startup chime is stored in firmware and so also unaffected.

And that brings us to today. Currently I’m waiting until it’s time to head over to the Apple Store in the CambridgeSide Galleria to have them look at my MacBook. The problem is such that they’ll spend a few minutes looking it over and then tell me that they’ll have to send it in to the service center for repairs (they only do work on desktop locally, laptops are always shipped out). It should be a fairly quick repair though, so I should only be without my laptop for probably a week at the most. Fortunately I bought AppleCare for it, so the repair will be free.

I’m also working on designing a home theater setup for the condo. Currently the only screen we have to watch the few tv shows and movies we watch is my monitor. This isn’t as bad as it sounds, as it’s a Dell 24″ LCD with greater than HD resolution (1920×1200), but it does mean that we have to sit in the office on our desk chairs which isn’t as comfortable as it could be. The other day we tried moving my computer out to the living room to see if the screen was big enough to use as a tv in there. It isn’t quite, but it wasn’t actually all that bad. However since my MacBook just died I had to move the computer back into the office so that it would actually be useable. So now I’m planning out what will become our home theater system. I’m fairly positive that for the screen I’ll be getting the Olevia 342i, a 42″, 720p tv without an HDTV tuner. This may seem lacking, but it isn’t. At about 8-10′ away, the difference between 720p and 1080p on a 42″ screen won’t really be noticeable. And we dont’ need a built-in HDTV tuner, because I’m going to be using the TV with a SiliconDust HDHomeRun. The HDHomeRun is a much better choice for us becaues it’s a dual-tuner device, and it’s compatible out of the box with MythTV, which is what I plan on using to manage our video library and for it’s DVR capabilities. That leaves only the question of how to implement the MythTV system. I’ve narrowed that down to two options:

1. A Mac Mini. Actually, that’s a vast oversimplification. The Mini would only be running the MythTV front-end. The back-end would be running on a Linux box. I already have a suitable machine to use for the Linux box (I built it a couple years ago as a gaming rig, and it’s more than up to the task), I just need to reformat the drives and install MythTV. So the only cost there would be the Mac Mini (about $600) and the drives for storage ($330 for a 1 TB drive to start). So the total initial cost of that MythTV setup would be around $1000.
2. A TVease Zodiac. I’d get the $900 base model, because I don’t need/want the analog tuners and it’s cheaper to use the HDHomeRun than to get a model with HD tuners; also it’s cheaper to add more storage myself. This ends up being a little costlier, but significantly easier in terms of setup and usage. It also reduces the number of components the system has by allowing me to put the MythTV front-end and back-end in the same box without significantly reducing my storage capacity (it has room for three drives, so a maximum of 3 TB, but I can always add external drives as well so the maximum storage capacity is essentially infinate). I probably wouldn’t get a new HD for it right off the bat. Even though it will only come with a 250 GB drive, I can point it to the 500 GB RAID that I currently store my digital video collection on over the network so I think it will be sufficient for now. Of course eventually I’d probably want to put another TB or more into it. The total initial cost of this MythTV setup is also about $1000, but much easier to accomplish.

So I have to figure out which setup I want to use. The Mac Mini will look better, but the Zodiac doesn’t look that bad, and the eventual plan is to recess it into the wall anyway which will look pretty cool no matter which I use. I’m really leaning towards the Zodiac right now, but I want to do a little more research before I make any sort of decision like that. In the mean time, I can at least get the TV and see about hacking it into the current setup (perhaps using KnoppMyth on my PC (the reason I’m not going to just go with a plan like that is it won’t look as good and will be loud, should be perfectly fine for a temporary setup though).

This will be my second post written from my iPhone. I’m currently in the middle of nowhere in Illinois at Jessi’s mom’s house. We’ll be here until the 30th, which means I’ll have some work to do on the trip. On my previous visits here there was always a wifi network available from one of the neighbors who was kindly sharing his sattelite Internet connection with the rest of the town (it’s a very small town and they can’t get cable or DSL out here). Sadly it turns out that someone had been using up his monthly bandwidth allotmen so that’s no longer available to me. Hence me writing this entry from my iPhone.

Fortunately, I came prepared to work without Internet access. I had planned to do some work on the flight over here, so before I left I created a new Parallels virtual machine and installed a copy of Gentoo Linux in it, and set up a lighttpd server with PHP and Python running in FastCGI as well as SQLite and MySQL so I could do both PHP and Django development without having to only guess at whether or not it would actually work (technically this wasn’t necessary for Django since it comes with a lightweight development server built-in, and OS X comes with SQLite installed standard, but I figures I might as well).

I also tried setting up Tinyproxy on my iPhone so I could share my iPhone’s EDGE connection with my laptop for browsing, but for some reason it doesn’t seem to be working even though I had no problem with it at home.

The end result is that, even though I have no real Internet access to speak of, I can still do my work. I can even keep in touch with everyone thanks to my iPhone and meebo, and, if the need were to arise, I could always set up an SSH tunnel through my iPhone and get SFTP access to my webserver (or any other, for that matter) that way. So even way out here where they don’t even have DSL, I’m still fully connected. This is one of those times where, even though I spend pretty much all my time working with technology, I’m still completely amazed by it.

Now, I believe, it’s time for dinner.

I’m writing this from my brand new iPhone. I know that I had previously said that I would wait to get one and that I wasn’t particularly interested in the first generation one, but it turned out to actually be a fairly practical purchase, surprisingly enough.

It all started because Jessi’s birthday is coming up (as is mine) and I knew she wanted an iPhone. We had, up until today, been on a family plan from Verizon, which saved us a fair bit of money over the two individual plans we had before. But because of that it complicated the matter of getting an iPhone for Jessi. So I looked at just about every possible configuration of cell phone plans we could possibly have.

It turns out that T-Mobile is unequivocally the cheapest provider, while Verizon is the most expensive (I didn’t bother looking at Sprint, they have nothing that would interest me over the others). AT&T are in the middle. After comparing the monthly costs of a Verizon family plan, a T-Mobile family plan, an AT&T non-iPhone family plan, an AT&T iPhone family plan, an individual iPhone plan and an individual T-Mobile plan, and an individual iPhone plan and an individual Verizon plan I found that there were only a few cases that actually made sense.

Due to the fact that there was still a whole year on our Verizon contract it just didn’t make financial sense to switch to another provider to try and save money, so regular family plans on T-Mobile or AT&T were ruled out. The only way that it made sense to switch wireless providers was if it was going to involve getting Jessi an iPhone (assuming an iPhone is actually worth the extra money, that is). Between the theee options that involved getting an iPhone for Jessi (an iPhone family plan or an iPhone individual plan for Jessi and an individual plan for me from either Verizon or T-Mobile—an iPhone individual plan plus a non-iPhone individual plan from AT&T would actually be more than the iPhone family plan because if the amount of minutes needed) the cheapest actually turns out to be the iPhone family plan.

So the only remaining issue was the initial cost of two iPhones plus the early termination fee from Verizon. Apple’s new price drop on the iPhone pretty well took care of that and the clearance prices on the 4GB model offset the cost of the early termination fee. So I figured that there’s no time like the present and ordered two 4GB iPhones.

Making this even more amazing is the fact that I placed the order Yesterday, I got the free shipping that’s supposed to take 5-7 business days, and the iPhones arrived TODAY! Way to go Apple.

And yes, I typed this whole entry out on the touchscreen, I’d have to say that the concerns about it not being usable were unfounded. The only problem I’m having with it so far are that it can’t quite keep up with my typing which can be annoying and takes me back to the days when I was using a IIgs. Also when it gets too far behind the autocorrection stops working until I stop and let it catch up. But even so, this is by far the best phone I’ve ever had, and I like it way more than a Blackberry.

Now to turn of the damned keyboard sound…

Jessi and I are currently the proud owners of two cars. One, a 1983 Mercedes Benz 300sd, which you probably already know about. The other, an ‘06 Mazda 3 Grand Touring Hatchback with just over 14,000 miles and an extended warranty good until 100,000 miles. Although we did have to finance the Mazda, we got an absolutely fantastic deal on it (about $5,000 under Blue Book).

The Mercedes is currently having a new engine put in. It simply wasn’t selling as a two ton paperweight, and we were able to find someone who could get us a new engine for much less than the previous quotes we had been given and have it installed by the end of this week, so we decided to go for it so that we have a chance of actually selling it and recouping our losses. The good news is that the new engine has only 100,000 miles on it. The old one was just shy of 300,000 when it gave out, and these engines regularly exceed 500,000 so I’m confident that the Mercedes is in about as good condition as a car of this vintage could possibly be.

Sadly, it’s just not realistic to keep it along with the Mazda, and we definitely want to keep the Mazda rather than the Mercedes, so the Benz is still for sale. If anyone is interested please let me know. All the same stuff is true about it now as before: body is in great condition with some minor rust on the rear, driver side fender (and I have a replacement fender that will go with the car), minor electrical issues (radio, sunroof, passenger power seat), and a ton of spare parts including an extra set of wheels with some very nice snow tires and two extra rear differentials (one for a gasoline model that will get you better mileage if you use it on a diesel).

The Mazda even comes with an amusing name. I’m not really one of those people who’s into naming my car (I mean really, it’s just a car…). This time, however, the car definitely has a name. When we were getting into it to drive away from the lot we discovered what appears to be the only remnant left of the previous owner (well, probably lessor considering the low mileage and recent model year): an SAT vocab flash card. The word on the card? ‘Recalcitrant’. Considering the huge amounts of trouble, stress, and anxiety we’ve gone through with this whole car ordeal leading to us buying the Mazda in the first place (and, really, continuing until the Benz sells) we decided that it’s the perfect name for the car. So our nice ‘new’ Mazda 3 shall now be known as The Recalcitrant (’recalcitrant’ just sounds like a ship name to me, so it was either that or U.S.S. Recalcitrant… or, I suppose, HMS Recalcitrant).

This weekend, Jessi and I were down in New York having a nice relaxing weekend. I had gone down earlier in the day with a friend, and Jessi came down after she got off work bringing another friend. When she was down around Hartford the car died on her. We couldn’t find any Mercedes garages in the area so we had it towed to a dealership where we had to wait until yesterday just to get a diagnosis. It turns out that the timing chain broke, almost definitely rendering our engine permanently useless. We’ve talked to a number of different mechanics and it seems the only option for getting the car running again is to replace the engine. This would cost us about $5000, on top of which it would likely take several months just to find a new engine to put in as they’re rare and in high demand. We can’t really be without a car for several months (sadly), so the only option available to us is to replace the car.

Fortunately, it still has some value even though it needs a new engine, so we should hopefully be able to get some money back out of it which will help offset the cost of another car we’ll have to get early next week (this parts already planned out and shouldn’t be a problem).

So, anyone interested in buying a 1983 Mercedes Benz 300 sd Turbo Diesel in need of a new engine? It comes with a second set of wheels with very nice snow tires on them, two extra rear diffs with half-shafts (one is for a gasoline), and various and sundry other, smaller spare parts. It could be a great car, and I was really looking forward to driving it for many years to come.

Also, does anyone know of a good, cheap way that we could get it back up here from Hartford? Regardless of where the eventual buyer lives, we need to move it out of the dealership’s lot where it currently is.