Category: Good Things

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That was surprisingly easy and nice.

It turns out that I don’t have to pony up a complete payment for the car.

That’s a mercy! The young lady asked first if I was wanting to refinance it, and I smiled back at her, “With these insane rates?”

She thought about it for a minute then looked at the current rate. “OH!” She said, “Let’s see if there are any other options.”

I patiently waited. After several phone calls, she said, “Here’s what we’re gonna do. We’re gong to merge your account into the joint account and then that account will be yours alone. The car loan will then remain there and your automatic payments will continue as normal.”

WOW! Talk about super nice! I’ve gotta say that this particular credit union has been fantastic for the 30 – odd years that we dealt with them. After the fire, when literally everything including our IDs had been burned. It was this credit union that handed us debit cards, and gave us access to our cash because they had photos of us, scans of our signatures, and the smarts to identify us without our drivers license. The same cannot be said of two major banks we were dealing with!

It was amazing.

And once again, they’ve come through making the life of one of their customers easier instead of insanely over complicated.

This is a relief. Now I’ll move forward with putting new tires on the car and have the service done. (Why bother to do any of that if there was any question about me keeping the car?)

Then there’s this. I was out and about with my new iPad and was having a problem getting data on the cellular link. I tried a bunch of things, nothing helped.

“OH NO, I have to call Apple.” Surprisingly I got someone who knew her stuff, she was in Canada and was very pleasant to talk with. We walked through everything and on the Apple side everything should have been working.

She was very sorry but had to direct me to my carrier. It was okay.

Elapsed time on the phone 10 minutes including hold time… Nice!

On the the cellular carrier. Again, got right through to a lovely lady in Idaho. We stepped through normal stuff and then she called someone with a bit more experience. A gentlemen came on the line and said, “I’m going to reset some things on our end, would you please reset your network settings on your iPad? “

I said, “Sure,” and set about that process.

Boom everything started working properly. Elapsed time including hold time about 10 minutes.

So 20 minutes grand total and the iPad is working exactly as it’s supposed to.

Today the power will be off for about 6 hours. Oh goody!

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I’m in love with this new computer

Finally! I’ve got a machine that has some staying power.

The battery life on this thing is out of sight and thus far, I haven’t been able to push the system hard enough to have the fan come on. Something I could easily do with the intel based machine.

Plenty of memory space, plenty of storage space, fast, and useful. I like the keyboard much more that the old one (even when the old one worked properly,) There’s a nice feedback from the keys when you press them.

There are still some tweaks and settings changes from time to time but overall I’m pleased. At the price of this machine I damn well better be pleased!

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After almost a year I finally broke down and bought a new computer.

Truth be told, I bought a new machine last year.  It was defective out of hte box. Long story short, I ended up paying for that machine even after it was stolen from the carrier when I shipped it back to the manufacturer.

This meant putting up with a machine that was failing in a number of ways, not the least of which was the keyboard. There were other things too. strange and unaccountable crashes and behaviors that I’d see but the computer would claim didn’t happen. Uh Huh… tell me that AI hasn’t already invaded our computers…

After a year of my older system degrading. I finally bit the bullet and ordered what I wanted. I got the new machine yesterday, It’s up & running and we’re in the “Settiling” portion of our lives. I rebuilt the system from the ground up, not using any backups. So I relaoded everything and then moved the data from the server to the new system. 

My reasoning for this was that I wanted to leave behind anything that might have been lurking in system files from the old machine(s) and get a fresh start. So here we are…

Hopefully this will make filling out forms and job applications a bit easier, and less error prone.

What I’m saying here is any errors in text, punctuation, or what have you, are now soley the problem of the human running the machine not the machine.

Maybe I’ll even be writing more since it won’t be quite so frustrating an experience.