I’m sad to say that my iPod seems to have checked out rather permanently this weekend. Rather suddenly and sadly it no longer provides me with tunes on the bus and at work. I gave it my best shot at fixing it with all of my hard fought geekery (which was really me just sort of smacking it around a bit) but to no avail. To be honest it has seen lots of use, and hardware failures happen, but hey, what are ya gonna do?

One thing I’m sure I won’t do is call Apple to fix it. Since it’s over two years old, it’s well out of warranty. If you follow the online thread and open a repair ticket on the Apple web site, they basically start off by reminding you to confirm your payment information since it’s going to cost about $300 to fix my two year old iPod. Huh? A brand new, bigger, colour one that plays videos (mine doesn’t) is $299. I was so confused that I called Apple to make sure I hadn’t wandered into some crazy land of obviously insane web pages. Nope, that’s the right one, alright. I thanked the helpful Apple person on the phone and carefully closed the browser window without letting them charge my credit card. I have since ordered a refurbished one from the Apple site with a warranty, with a case, for less money than they were going to charge me to fix my old one. That’s just nuts. I’m thinking that they really don’t want that iPod repair business too badly. But then again, where do they get their refurbished units? Am I getting a deal on some poor bastard’s broken new iPod that he sent in for repairs? Is the refurb business even more lucrative since they get to charge twice for the same unit? Am I a sucker no matter how I look at it? Are these questions rhetorical since I went ahead and bought another iPod anyway and it’s already on it’s way? Should I have even purchased another one at all given my cost of ownership for the last one was about $19/month since I bought it. On the plus side, that means that this one only has to last a little over a year for me to get the same ROI.  Finally, am I a huge nerd for obsessing about this?

Go ahead and comment if you have any opinions on this matter, I’m interested to know what both of you think.

Just installed the updated beta 2 for Firefox 2, and they finally fixed something that I have long thought was broken.  I thought it was broken, but I didn’t complain to anybody or try to fix it myself of course, that would be way too proactive and helpful.  They have fixed the “which tab am I looking at” problem.  Before this build, and I think for most every version of Firefox the current tab was hard to distinguish from the background tabs.  Now the current tab is clearly “bolder” and the background tabs are faded out a bit, it really takes the guesswork out.

That’s a good fix to an annoying time waster that really bugged me quite a bit.

When I started looking at web hosting companies I had exactly zero experience with any of them, having always had the server at home and being my own host.  Excellent flexibility, but extremely poor reliability as some of you may have noticed over the years.  So, I looked around and asked a few folks and while I had a recommendation for BlueHost from a friend of Wilson’s and the WordPress.org site, sure enough I came up with another host which I won’t name here.  I ignored all of the good advice because the other guys were offering more disk space.  I had a few other questions for them, which I asked using the handy web form they provided for this purpose.  After waiting a whole day for a response, I figured that maybe there was a problem with their site, maybe my question got lost or something.  So I asked it again.  Still another day without an answer.

Yep, so I went right off to the BlueHost site, and after some poking around I found the CEO’s blog.  The top post was one that said that being a BlueHost customer really sucked at the moment because they were having some technical troubles, and he apologized for the outages, and said what they were doing to fix it.  Man, that really inked the deal.  That’s exactly the way companies should communicate with their customers.  I signed up immediately.  Following that I had some questions and I called them and got answers right away.  Then, later in the day I got a phone call welcoming me and asking if I had any trouble.  Simply excellent service.
So, it took me maybe one day to find a new host, sign up, install WordPress and transfer the blog posts.  That’s damn good.  And the best part is once I had everything up and running, I got a message from the other web host guys.  He answered my question (very late) and had the nerve to ask me to use his name when I signed up so he got his commission….

So far so good, playing with the templates a bit.  I’m not sold on the new look yet, I have a little wrapping problem with the categories near the top.

Anyway it’s much easier than Movable Type and it’s screaming fast on the BlueHost server.

Bear with me until I figure out how to get the content back in here….

This is Mundane Ramblings tho.