indiboi.com

I simply do not understand how an ACH deposit put together on Wednesday and sent Thursday is still not posted to my bank account by Saturday night. This is the age of electronic transfering, that’s what this is, obviously… does my bank need to manually type in that money was electronically deposited? It’s insanity. If the deposit is sent Thursday I want it to appear on the account on Friday. There is no sense in it taking longer than 24 hours, ideally it’d show immediately.

To follow along with that level of annoyance, a paper check deposit, also made on Wednesday, did pot post to the account until Friday night!

I think I’m going to go re-open/open an account at the Credit Union. They’re completely electronic; the moment you deposit the check, cash, or what have you, it is then immediately available and posted to your account.

I’m not sure that it is my bank being slow in this particular instance, perhaps the depositing bank decided to take its grande old time this week, but regardless I’m terribly annoyed by the entire process.

To make matters even worse, my paycheck last week was short. I had an instance where one smaller transaction was cancelled to be replaced by a larger transaction. The smaller transaction was subtracted from my payment; however the new payment didn’t clear until about 10 seconds too late to actually make it onto the payment. So, a big portion of my payment last week is actually the annoyingly delayed payment for this week!

These delays and annoyances are making it nearly impossible to actually manage my financial situation. Granted, it’s primarily my fault for deciding to budget on a paycheck to paycheck basis, versus having a whole big wad of cash sitting in the account at all times. I used to do it that way, but then I decided to stop being a hermit and actually buy the crap I want to buy… for me and for other people. I had all of my Christmas purchases nicely planned out as to which payment would pay for which item, it’s just not actually working that way because my paychecks keep being screwed with in one way or another.

I’d like to say that I forgot about the very idea of writing here, but in reality I’ve just been too lazy to bother with it. So… I present a quick rundown of events and all that fun stuff.

David came down for my Birthday, the weekend prior. It was nice to see him again, as usual. We had Matthew and Kate over for a “fall cookout” or some other very long title we’d given it and I can’t really remember. Oh, it was vegetarian too, of course. Gardenburgers, and baked beans made with fake bacon, whoo! That was exceptionally entertaining, particularly the part where they put 27 candles on the birthday cake we’d all decorated together. I have to say that was the ugliest cake I’ve ever seen.

We also started up a roaring fire in the new fire bowl I’d bought a couple of weeks prior. I had gathered up some wood a couple of days prior, but given I’d never actually used it, nor really created a fire for warmth and light… well, it was definitely not enough wood. So, cut to everyone periodically gathering up more in the frigid outdoors. It was nice too, hard cider and clove cigarettes by the fire.

I’ve endured poor quality black and white printing from my laser printer for quite a while. The pages would always come out lightly dusted with toner making them appear as though it was black text on gray paper. When it first started happening I discussed it with a friend and he said it was simply the toner running out. Since I’d never owned a laser printer before I wasn’t sure if that was actually the case, perhaps we weren’t on the same wavelength in terms of diagnosing the problem.

The other day I went to Staples to buy a new office chair, about time really. I found this nice high backed microsuede ‘manager’ chair a month or so prior, but didn’t really feel like spending all that money on something that I didn’t actually need. My patience, if you want to call it that, was rewarded because it was put on sale for a hefty $40 off. I really like the chair, it has great lumbar support, padded arms, and a headrest that actually works.

The point of mentioning the chair was because during that process my receipt was printed on one of their fancy colour laser printers, oooh… I realize that I’m ashtonishingly weird because I get excited over things like print quality. Anyway, seeing crisp printing on that receipt really annoyed me, in the sense that my laser printer was putting out total shit.

I’d held off on buying a new toner cartridge because they were retailing for around $70. That’s really not too bad, I suppose, except that the price of mono laser printers has come down so much that, well, we’re getting into the “free printer with purchase of toner” situation, just like inkjet printers are in… except of course it’s “free printer with purchase of insanely expensive ink.”

I decided to actually look online for the toner and found that newegg.com had it for almost half the price of the local b&m type office shops. I opted for the 3,000 page toner versus the 6,000 page one, mostly because of cost, but the price difference ended up really just being that 6K was twice the 3K… made sense to just get the smaller one instead (two 3K = one 6K costwise, etc, even playing field).

The new toner cartridge fixed the print quality problem, huzzah for that. I have nicely crisp text again. I really like laser printers simply because of the cost per page being so low… even if the initial investment is higher. The chances of running out of toner when you need it are so much lower than that of running out of ink with the inkjet printers… You won’t find a 3,000 or even 6,000 page inkjet cartridge. In this case the toner was actually cheaper than buying ink for my (unused for two years) inkjet printer which managed practically nothing before running out of ink.

I’m still very interested in a colour laser printer, but the main thing holding me back, again, is the high initial investment. Okay, so perhaps $500 for a ‘personal’ colour laser isn’t so bad… and I’ll get thousands of pages before I need to add more toner, but when you have four cartridges to replace that each cost $100… ouch! We’re pretty much back to the ‘free printer with toner’ situation, and it’d be better to just buy a new printer, heh. This is certainly true when it comes time to replace the fuser, opc belt, etc, which comes around 60,000 pages. I found some idiotic person bitching about having to pay $400 to replace the OPC belt on her $500 printer after six months. Well, uhm, if you’ve printed 60,000 pages in six months… just buy a new printer and quit bitching. You’d never get 60,000 pages out of even four inkjet printers before they’d disintegrate. All types of printers have consumables, toners, inks, belts, etc… It’s just on ‘throw-away’ printers, well, the companies realize that it’s pointless to sell those parts. The plastic case the parts are in costs practically nothing, but the guts of the machine wear out… and the OPC belt, and fuser are some pretty damned important parts to a colour laser printer.

I think I found one that meets my needs, while it isn’t the best, the price is almost right. I think, whenever I get around to wanting it bad enough to actually pay that much for printing, I’ll be getting a Brother HL-2700cn. It’s compatible with *nix, Mac, & Windows (very, very important), it’s network-ready (important, and helpful… no need to buy an extra printer server)… relatively fast, and all around not too bad. I dislike the lack of bypass/manual feeding of paper, but honestly I rarely ever use it on my current (also Brother) laser, and the reviews indicate the graphics are ‘fair’ …but hmmm, it isn’t like you actually print photos with this sort of printer anyway. To get into the higher quality graphics pretty much doubles the cost, and well… I can buy disposable inkjet printers if necessary. When it comes to photo printing it is much better and more economical to just have a minilab at a pharmacy, walmart, etc, print them, at least in my learned opinion. ;)

I’ve long had this fascination with riding Amtrak’s “high-speed” Acela train. With my trip to New York this past weekend, the fascination has evolved into more of a desire to actually ride that particular train [service]. Now, there’s coach and business class on the ‘regular’ train, business class is slightly more… say from Philly it’s about $20 more, so a total ticket of roughly $60. The Acela is $110, almost double (business class again, no coach on Acela), and arrives a pathetic 10 minutes sooner.

Where’s the lure here? Granted, it’s not far from Philly to New York a bit over an hour using either a ‘regular’ train or the Acela. It simply doesn’t make any sense to spend nearly double to get there 10 minutes faster, one could say almost triple if comparing Acela to coach. If one were to depart from Baltimore the time savings isn’t much better.

Ten minutes here and ten minutes there… if I needed to travel from DC to Boston, then it would save quite a bit of time, but city to city, it’s a pointless waste of money. I still want to ride the Acela, just to have experienced the “high speed” train, but… it’s not significantly faster than the regular ol’ cheapie ticket.

I’m in New York as of yesterday afternoon, so… problems of the world that require my solutions will just need to be put on hold until I return to the countryside of home Monday night.

I’m not quite sure how my mother can stand it… the noise of her computer. That thing, built by my brother David, sounds like it’s about to launch into orbit. Now, my file server is a bit noisy, one of the reasons I’m thinking about moving it out of the office… but it has four hard drives in it… while they’re all fairly quiet, the noise is cumulative. Her computer is a hand me down, just like her monitor is… I think it’s time to change all of that.

I mentioned, vaguely, the idea of getting her a tiny computer to go with the LCD panel I’d probably be getting her for Christmas. She wasn’t totally enthusiastic, but… I guess she just doesn’t understand that computers don’t need to be huge and loud. My workstation is virtually silent, unless under heavy strain, then the fan speed increases. It is a bit warm, with only one fan… but I really think the six or so fans in her computer is overkill.

I took inventory of her system just a bit ago, it’s not terribly behind in technology, but it isn’t exactly cutting edge either. She has 512MB of memory, all the usual stuff basically, with an 80GB PATA drive.

Essentially, for $155 I could get her an AOpen EZ18, in either white or black without having to buy anything else — her cpu, ram, drive, etc, all fit in there without issue.

I think she’d like it… I’m sure it’d be considerably more quiet, smaller is always better, plus it would be much more visually appealing too. I think I might just get that for her birthday next month… and then the LCD for Christmas.

Oh, and it looks like Shuttle has released their SN26P barebones… I have little to no interest in SLI, but I really like the violet front panel, it looks so hot, haha.