purchase posts page 3

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Barring unforeseen events, I will be buying a house. The seller has accepted my offer and signed the agreement. This will be my first “real” house, though I did own a not-very-good mobile home for a while. It is contingent on inspection, which I will be lining up as soon as possible, and then getting a mortgage. I’m kind of excited, though a bit worried at the same time.

Toby Now

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My roommate has been out of town this week for work. It’s been me and the dogs. I got to work from home a couple days so I could feed them. Normally when I work from “home”, I actually work from the library, because my roommate doesn’t like me working from home. The dogs have been mostly good, though as usual they can be a bit demanding for attention.

Bought myself a few things earlier this week. Got my first ever electric razor (Phillips-Norelco PQ208). I’ve only used it once, but it seems like it’s going to speed up my shaving experience and make it more likely for me to do. Also, since I usually let my blades get rather dull before buying new ones, it will be less painful. It’s just a travel one, so it cost around as much as a 5 pack of blades for my former razor, the Mach 3.

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My new car

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After my car died, I went looking for a car. I had to borrow my roommate’s car many times and my dad’s car while he was on vacation. I even rode my bicycle 20+ miles to work one day, though my roommate picked me up for the trip home. It took me over a month to make my decision.

Search

I had wanted to get a small stickshift hatchback a little smaller than my Corolla that would be able to get a little better gas mileage. Unfortunately, it was hard to find a model within my price range that actually fit my requirements. I spent a lot of time looking at craigslist, cars.com, autotrader.com, and others.

I called and emailed a number of private sellers, but never ended up going to see one. They seem harder to deal with, as you have to set up a time to meet and all, and then can’t take the car unless the title place is opened or they’ve already got their title notarized. I also visited a great many lots and test drove a number of cars.

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wonderwash

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I recently purchased a clothes washing “machine” for my home. It is the Wonderwash, a hand powered small washing machine. I was a little leery of the product, as it didn’t seem to have much more to it than would a plastic bucket with tight lid. However, it’s very small and costs only $50, and is supposed to use less water and much less energy than a conventional washer, so I sprung for it.

It is indeed similar to a bucket. It does come with a stand and crank, which seem to make it take up more room than a 5 gallon pickle bucket would while having a bit less capacity. But the cranking is fairly easy. I could simply roll a pickle bucket, but I’m not sure if that’d be as effective as rotating it on the other axis, with the sudden thwumping fall from one side to the other. The lid is screwed down, which is supposed to pressurize the contents (it definitely does). The pressure is supposed to do much of the cleaning, pushing the water and detergent through the clothing. This is the area I’m most worried about the pickle buckets capability. I will have to try the pickle bucket though to see how the results compare. It would be much cheaper, easier to obtain, more versatile, and smaller. The only other thing I’d be missing would be the spigot on the bottom of the wonderwash, which is nice save for the leaking it sometimes does.

So anyway, the Wonderwash thus far has done fairly well at cleaning my clothes, even in the two minute wash cycle recommended. Crank for two minutes. Drain and fill with rinse water. The rinsing takes 30 seconds, but I usually do two rinses. The whole process is fairly fast, most of the time going to filling and draining. Compared to hand washing, it seems to get the clothes somewhat cleaner, though probably not as well as normal washers. It is of course much easier, with no hands in the water, and is much faster. The rinse is also much easier and faster and seems to get better results with less water (the wash also uses less water than what I was using).

The biggest problem right now is with drying. I can easily handle hang drying from a regular washer, as the clothes are spun in them. There is no spinning in this or any ability to squeeze out the water as a group. This problem was the same as with hand washing, and is one reason I rarely did it. Since this is so much easier than hand washing, I’m more liable to do it. But I have almost no space for drip drying. Those clothes can really hold a lot of water. I can spend quite a bit of time squeezing them by hand and they still drip. I think the presses would probably be too bulky and take too much time. I’m considering a spinner. The wonderwash people also make two electric spin dryers. Uses energy, but it’d be fast and take me nearly to the dry point. I considered getting a commercial salad spinner instead, but they cost as much as the electric ones and would be more bulky and not get the clothes as dry. So I may just order an electric spinner soon.

Unfortunately, the spinner hurts the size advantages of the whole operation. I now need the washer, the spinner, and still need some hang drying space and apparatus. Luckily, the energy needs and water usage should be much lower. I’m hoping that once I get everything set up and get a good system going, the time required will not be much more than with the regular machines, especially since I have to drive to my parents to use them.

palm problems

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I’ve had quite a bit of problems with my Palm Treo 650.

Some of the third party software seemed to have caused some major problems with the phone. I know for sure that some problems were caused by a third party application required to make the stylus work for the Treo (Treo’s seem to come with Graffiti hand writing recognition disabled). The phone kept having weird problems like freezing, going slowly, and the like, even while making calls.

The other problem seems to have been related to the battery. The battery seemed to have problems with holding a charge, so I figured it must have been old when I bought it, though I thought the seller said it was new. I took the power adapter with me in the car and used an inverter with that to power the phone so I could make calls while out. After doing that, my phone would go into a crazy epileptic mode where it would flash on and off the startup screen rapidly. Every once in a while I could get it to start up by plugging it in for a while, then unplugging it. It would start up and last for a little while, but eventually go back to epileptic mode. Eventually this became quite permanent.

After finally figuring out how, I did a full reset of the device, getting rid of the applications and what not. This did not help. I got a new battery, figuring the old one was shot and for some reason it needed a good battery to work at all. This worked slightly at first, but it started going back to epileptic mode again. So I figured, as a last try, that it might be a problem with the charger, that perhaps my inverter or something else ruined the charger. I bought a dock thing with a seperate battery charger. After much waiting with no phone through all these problems, the charger worked and the phone works just fine again, like it had when I first got it. The separate charger bay wasn’t necessary, as just the dock charging through the phone works, but it is nice with my additional purchased battery to have a backup in case I forget to charge up. Another $40 about for the two items, but I have a working phone again.

I’m very happy, as the cell phone is quite useful, especially since I have no long distance for my home phone; I was unable to make some calls for a while. It has been very useful for contacting cousin Paul and uncle Al while out of the house. It was also quite useful in contacting a friend Corinne about a mock news program my droogie Dwight is making for a video portfolio, as we needed to meet her at Kent State’s news room and needed a way to contact her to make sure she was able to make it (she was running late).

Fully entering the cell phone world

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I had stayed out of the cell phone world for quite some time. I don’t use the phone much, and cell phones cost a lot. A few years back I got a pay-as-you-go type phone, but it was quite expensive to actually call from: I rarely used it, and gave up on it when I accidently missed a payment date and lost all my minutes. Last Christmas, my Mom gave me another pay-as-you-go, with a bunch of minutes. I decided I’d try actually using this one. The first batch of minutes were all free for me, but even with a lot of them, I was able to go through them pretty quickly. When I ran out, it came time to make a choice.

Cousin Paul told me he could get me on his family plan at Alltel for $10 a month. I compared that with Tracfone’s prices. Tracfone would have had a slightly lower minimum price once I paid for their double minutes for life thing, but that wouldn’t be for a lot of minutes. I decided that, if I wanted to actually use it, I should just go with the Alltel. The contract worried me a bit, especially when I found out it was for the crappily ridiculously long two years, but I figured I’d live with that.

I bought a relatively cheap phone from Alltel, new. It’ll have cost me $60 if I get the rebate back with activation and all. It was a flip phone. It had a screen on the outside and mp3 buttons. It could play mp3s and movies. It had a camera. It could browse the web, though I had no interest in that bit because of cost. It worked pretty well, and I was relatively happy with it, except for some UI problems. I had it for about two weeks, then lost it during a trip to Seattle.

Buying a new phone with a contract already in place was ridiculously expensive. The one I had before suddenly became $250. The cheapest at that store was $150, and it was pretty crappy. Elsewhere, I could find down to about $100. So I decided I’d have to go used. I soon found online was the only reasonable place to find used.

In deciding what to buy, I found used phones still weren’t that cheap, though much more so than the new ones. For some reason, I thought perhaps I should just buy a combination PDA and cell phone. I had always wanted a PDA. I’m also very interested in touch-screen stuff. I figured one of the older models would be going for pretty cheap. I found that there weren’t that many models from far in the past, so I had relatively few choices. The newer ones were certainly quite expensive, no iphone or the like for sure (especially since none seemed to be made for Alltel). I always liked the Palm OS, wanted handwriting recognition for sure.

I found the Palm Treo 650 had all the features newer phones had, was available for Alltel, and wasn’t all that expensive. There was one locally on Craigslist, but it was from long enough ago that I didn’t even try for it. I returned, after many years, to eBay. I watched carefully, checked out all the ones available, picked the few I was willing to go for. I bid on several, sometimes going a little above what I wanted to pay and still didn’t get one. I almost gave up and went for the buy it now option. But I managed to win one. It ran $110 with shipping. Not too bad for a “smartphone”.

It shipped extremely fast, got here in a few days with standard shipping. I was quite happy to get my new toy, and played with it quite a bit for the following two days. I was extremely disappointed that Graffiti did not work with it. Stupid that a Palm PDA wouldn’t have that. I was extremely relieved when I found third party freeware to enable it. I also found that there was no way to directly sync Apple’s Address Book and iCal with it, outside of buying a utility just for that purpose. Palm’s Desktop software was rather outdated (hasn’t been updated in 2+ years) but it installed fine. It took a little while to get working, but once I did, it works just fine. The utility does use a bit of constant CPU power, so I turn it off sometimes. It has a calendar and address book app, so I should be able to at least import into those and copy that version to the Palm.

It took me a while to find good apps for it. Palm’s site had a software bank, but much of that stuff cost money. VersionTracker, though, has a good depository, and I found an even better one at softonic. I found some good freeware apps. They were remarkably easy to install. Just a double click in the finder set up a transfer for the next sync. I installed the Graffiti enabling app, a better alarm clock (the default one only had one alarm and wasn’t that good), and a few games. It’s sweet that there is a gameboy emulator for it. I’m still having trouble getting it working well, and haven’t figured out how to get my games over to it, but this could mean I can have phone, PDA type device, mp3 player, crappy camera, and gameboy all in one device.

Hopefully I won’t lose this one. I figured its larger size would help with that. I have full plans to get a silicone type skin with a belt clip for it. That should help a lot, and make it easier to carry as well.

So I called to get it activated. I had to have Paul authorize me to do so. Then, after attempting to activate it the way the guy told me to, it hung up to me and said activation failed. I then told the guy it was a Palm Treo. He said I needed to update my plan to their Smart Choice plan. They started at $69.99. I would obviously need to okay this with Paul anyway, since it’s actually his plan, so I said I’d hold off. Looking on the website, it looked like the Smart Choice plan would be $30 a month more for the main line plus $10 more for each other person. I have no idea why the other people would have to pay more. Since I’d be paying this increase, that’d take my $10 up to $60 a month, almost enough to pay for my own plan.

I was rather distraught with this and mad that Alltel would make me change plans when all I wanted was to use my device as a phone. After I calmed down, I figured that I’d call to verify the cost difference. If it was only like $30, I would probably go for it. It did, after all, have free unlimited data. If it was any more than that, though, that’d quickly overrun the cost of just buying a used regular phone. So I’d have to get another phone, and probably be able to sell this one for what I got it for, maybe even a little more. I finally called back Alltel, and got a different guy this time. I said I heard I needed to upgrade to the Smart Choice plan for my ‘smartphone’. He asked if I had bought it with a contract or used. When I said used, he said I didn’t need the smart choice for it. I was excited, though a little worried that it might not actually work, especially since dialing the setup number hadn’t last time. It took him a while (I guess he was trying to figure out a way for me to use minutes for data). He had my dial a different setup number. After two test calls, we verified: It had worked! After ending the call, I made sure by calling my own house. It worked. I was elated, elated enough to write out this ridiculously long post.

So now I have phone service again, plus a little electronic toy that I can carry around with me. I’ll have to verify that it is good over several days here, but I think it should be fine. I better not lose it though.

Recumbent purchase

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Last month I purchased myself a recumbent Actionbent bicycle. It took a good while to get here. I had purchased it at the end of June with the hopes of having it ready for a trip to New York near the end of July, and it cut pretty close. It was a little confusing to assemble, since the instructions provided consisted mainly of small low quality pictures and very few words. I had to look at several different pictures and pages on the website to figure it out.

Unfortunately for me, I still was not able to get it finished for the trip: The seat they sent was missing a bracket to connect it to the frame. I thus could not attach the seat at all as it was supposed to be. I also was having trouble at that point with getting the rear derailler to work, but that simply required connecting the cable a little differently. I emailed the Actionbent guy. He gave no reply, but promptly sent something to me. It arrived while I was in New York. I was hopeful to ride the bike, but unfortunately, when I got back, I discovered he had sent the wrong parts. He sent to pieces that I already had. I sent him another email, but he neither replied nor sent anything this time. I guess I’ll let it slide: it’s a small two person business which as far as I know only has two employees. So for now I have tied the seat at the one point with a rope. I could probably fashion something similar to the bracket out of two properly sized right angle brackets, but I haven’t gotten around to that.

I had ordered a rear rack and a bag from Actionbent as well. I was a little leary about the bag, as only a brief description was given. It was one of those trunk kinds, but the description said it had zipout panniers. I didn’t figure they’d be very big, but I thought they’d be good enough for day trips. When I recieved it, though, there were no zipout panniers at all. Only regular pockets. I’ve since discovered that it’s a Sunlite Top Loader 1, while the Top Loader 2 and greater have the panniers. They sent me another pack when the sent me the new brackets, but it was the exact same pack. I got two packs from this, so I guess I can’t complain too much. Plus the panniers would only gain me about 100 cubic inches for the 2.