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The disposable society (or $35 to say it is broken)
Our washing machine started to become quiet noisy during its spin cycle, so we had a repair guy come out to give us an estimate. Knowing that our washer is 8 years old and a front loader, I suspected that the bearings or motor were bad as the whole drum rests on bearings and puts significant weight on them. So, I hoped for the best, but prepared for the worst; the worst being replacing the washing machine. The guy came out, listened to it for about 2 minutes and said that it will cost about $500 to replace and pretty much he wouldn't do it (he's only done a couple because most people replace them). Of course, this visit wasn't free; $35 to tell me that it was broken and had to be replaced. So we have maybe 6 months left before it blows. A new front loading washer with a warranty runs around $800. While not what I want to buy right now (not after my plumbing fiasco which turned into a bigger mess as I had to redo sprinklers in the back as well), but it makes little sense to put $500 into a machine without a warranty which could go at any time.
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The fallacy of an income tax refund
I'm almost ashamed to admit that this year I received a tax refund. Why? A tax refund means that you (including me) have provided the government with a zero interest loan. Granted I wouldn't have earned all that much on my refund, but it's the principle of loaning the government money. In my case, I was self-employed for a long time and doing an accurate estimate of my owed taxes was nearly impossible as my income fluctuated based on contracts I had and ReceiptWallet income, so I always ended up owing taxes at the end of the year. The latter part of last year, I started a W-2 job which kind of changed the game.
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What to do without the Internet?
I put my son down to bed and came downstairs to check on the Software Update Server I setup at work (I'll have some hints on this when I get a chance), only to find that my computer wouldn't connect to the Internet. I restarted and had the same problem. I went over to the cable modem, saw the blinking lights, restarted it, flipped on the TV to see snow and dialed the cable company (I memorized their phone number years ago when problems were quite frequent). The tech I spoke to asked me to restart my cable modem, I told him it was pointless as I had no cable TV, but he insisted. So, I just said, OK, walked into the other room, grabbed my computer, my cellular modem, and walked back into the TV room. The tech asked me to plug the cable modem back in, so I said, OK and went about my business of writing this post. Of course, I didn't bother to do what he said because I had no TV picture, so obviously I wasn't going to have a working cable modem! I love calling tech support and having people read from scripts.
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Bye, Bye ReceiptWallet
Today brings to an end my active involvement in ReceiptWallet. As readers of my blog know, Mariner Software bought ReceiptWallet. Today was the official passing of the baton. We initiated the domain transfer that could have taken up to 6 days, but within an hour, receiptwallet.com was in the hands of Mariner Software. All email, support, sales, etc. is now handled by Mariner. I'm not going away and will be available to Mariner as needed and I hope that they tap into my wealth of knowledge every now and again (I have learned something in the last 2 1/2 years of doing receipt/document management).