- Last winter I bought a couple Ionic Breeze Air Fresheners and have been relatively happy with them. But while I was at MacHack and WWDC, the little one in the bathroom crapped out. Don’t know if it was a thunderstorm that got it, or whether it just died, but I called up the Sharper Image and told ’em it had pooped out. They sent a new one, no questions asked, and it arrived a few weeks later. That’s pretty good customer service, I guess.
- I wonder if I’m going to need a Hot & Cold Mini Fridge for next year’s Saints season. It seems like a pretty good addition to the tailgating arsenal, but I worry about what it’ll do to the battery in my car. Anyone know how much power these things suck? And what about the heat from ’em? It would probably end up in the hatchback of my Camaro, and I’d hate to have it set the carpet on fire or melt the plastic around the hatch or something dumb like that.
- A couple weeks ago, I made my second warranty call to Danby about my Danby Countertop Dishwasher. The connector that you hook to the sink busted when I first got it, and this time, the power-switch broke. They happily shipped me out a new switch and a service manual, and after about an hour, I had the new switch installed, and it was working good again. I’m a little disappointed the switch gave out so soon, but the service was good, and they actually let me fix it myself, rather than hauling it to some appliance service place that would have wanted me to make a couple trips and leave my dishwasher with ’em. And lest you think their service was slow, it took me many more days to write this than it did for them to send me the replacement part.
- My birthday present for myself was a CRKT Apache model 7003. It’s a nice folding knife, and is made with ATS-34 steel, which sounds like pretty much the best choice. Made in Taiwan, but it seems like pretty good quality. I’ve been half-wanting a good pocket knife for a while, and decided this was the time to get one.
- In a non-toy-related note: Layne figured she’s written half a million words since September 2001 on her website. Well, I didn’t have a big conversion to go through to help me count the words I’ve written here, but I was curious. So I tried a few things and came up with
find -X . -iname \*html -print0 | xargs -0 wc
in the base of the website. It tells me 75799 lines, 664311 words, 8006399 characters. Now some of those files are auto-generated (like the full sitemap, which is over 10000 words), and there’s HTML markup (though less than you’d think) counted in there, but I’d say it’s around a quarter that I didn’t directly write between November 1997 and now. So it would be a close thing if it were a contest (it’s not, but figuring out how much I had typed helped me guage the numbers), but I had a nearly four-year head-start. Dang. That girl types a lot.