This whole WordPress bit is largely up and running now, so I’m going to start posting over here.

A few minor housekeeping bits:

• Here are links to the Main RSS Feed and the Comments RSS Feed. You’ll see a few comments from my brief (failed) attempt at using Blogger comments, but I’m still trying to figure out if/how I can import all my Haloscan comments.

• I am leaving the old version of blog up, if only for the simplicity of not having to go through and change all the damn URLs in the old permalinks.

• If there’s anything you particularly hate about this design, let me know, and I’ll see what I can work on. I’m going to futz with the size in the posts a bit since I spend too much time staring at a computer and am therefore starting to go a bit blind, so the font’s a wee bit smaller than I’d like.

• I’ve gotten about halfway through the draining task of updating the times on all my posts, but that shit’s going to take a while. The whole index page is fixed up, as is the April ’02-Oct ’04, but the rest will probably take me longer as I’m going to be traveling (more to come on that).

• One fun thing to come from having to correct the time on all my archives is going through and glancing at all my old posts and remembering things I’d forgotten. Like Chaplin is a year older than I remembered he was. I’d apparently been misremembering that he was between 1-2 when I got him, but this post from the day he came home says 2-3. Oops!

Anyway, that’s about the long and short of it for now, more details on my upcoming travels to come either later tonight or tomorrow morning.

1. Write a website that specializes in taking apart Apple products as soon as they’re released.

2. Realize that the first people in the world to get the new iPhone are in New Zealand.

3. Fly to Auckland to be fourth in line IN THE WORLD for your iPhone, so you can immediately take it apart and post pictures online.

4. Write the whole damn trip and the price of the phone off as business related.

5. Enjoy some gorgeous New Zealand scenery.

I think I’ve figured out how to land myself a job interview next Friday.

This theory came to me as I was waiting for my Chinese food for an hour and 15 minutes. I really had to pee, but I just KNEW the guy was going to come while I was in the bathroom.

Sure enough, I said “Oh the hell with this, I’m not waiting any longer,” and the guy came while I was in the bathroom.

This always happens to me: I wait and wait for what’s supposed to happen to happen, and then when it doesn’t, I start doing something else, and THEN what was supposed to happen happens.

Working from this trend, I’ve come up with a plan to have at the very least, a job interview by the end of next week.

My job finishes this Friday, and I had been planning (barring a sudden settlement with SAG) to try and leave town next Thursday for about a week and a half to visit my dad up in Idaho. I’ll be driving, so I’ll be stopping in Vegas on the way up next Thursday if all goes to plan.

I knew Dark Knight was coming out next Friday, and I really want to see it in IMAX, since they actually shot some of it in IMAX and I hear it’s brain-meltingly awesome.

So of course, I got online to see if there are tickets to the midnight IMAX screening in Vegas (and I’d like to pause here to note that IMAX tickets in Vegas are cheaper than regular movie tickets here), and there were.

So now, my evil plot: I bought my ticket to that midnight Thursday showing in Vegas.

By purchasing that ticket, I have close to guaranteed that something will come up in L.A. and I won’t be able to leave until Friday or Saturday, maybe not even at all.

Clearly, as I’m packing my shit into the car to leave on Thursday morning, I will get a phone call from someone who wants to interview me Friday morning, maybe even for a job that starts Monday.

And if my frustrating luck does not continue to hold…Well, I’ll get to see the Dark Knight in IMAX on opening night then spend a week in Idaho with my dad. It’s pretty much a win-win.

You know you’re a geek when you think, “God, this job-hunting would be so much easier with a spreadsheet.”

You are an even bigger geek when you actually make that spreadsheet.

You realize being a geek is a good thing when said spreadsheet actually does turn out to be helpful.

Hooray! My computer is back!

What makes me really happy is that they didn’t wipe my hard drive, so I’m pretty much back up and running immediately, with the exception of a few files I had to move around from the external drive I was saving everything to while I was using the temporary computer.

The really excellent news is that because they turned the repair around faster than they thought they would, the rental place only charged me for two weeks, even though I had it a couple extra days. Saved me another $80.

So basically, for waiting four extra days to get my computer back, I saved almost $700 in the great scheme of things.

I mean granted, this was still a very, very expensive excursion into the world of Setting An Example For People Of Why You Should Not Drop Your $2500 Computer.

But good lord, it could have been a lot worse.

I got a call from the folks at Apple about my computer today.

The bad news is, because I have a matte screen on my MacBook Pro and will not even consider getting a glossy screen, they won’t have a part in until Feb 7th, and won’t have my computer back to me until Feb. 11-12.

The good news is, to compensate me for my inconvenience, they offered me two options.

1. Ship me a brand new computer with the exact same specs for the same amount I would have paid for the repair, and have it arrive Friday (Feb 1) or Monday (Feb 4), or

2. Cut the price of the repair in half, and get it back the 11th-12th.

I have to admit, option #1 was thoroughly tempting, especially because after a week of using the temp MacBook, I’m more certain than ever that I made the right decision to spring for the Pro. The reflections on the glossy screen drive me batshit.

But after calling the computer rental place to see how much it would cost to extend the rental and running some numbers with sales tax, I realized that waiting was going to save me almost $600 to just wait for the repair.

So, the bad news is, I have to put up with the tiny, glossy, pain in the ass rental for a while longer, but the good news is, I save six hundred bucks.

At this point, the option that saves me $600 wins, even if it involves fire ants. Which, thankfully, this does not.

…Where there are no electronic things I can break or have crap out on me.

The fucking hard drive on the laptop I rented while mine’s getting fixed up and died on me when I got back from work.

I ran disk utility off my Leopard install disk (a way you can sometimes fix problems with a pesky drive), and it was like the laptop’s drive wasn’t even there.

If, somehow, the shop I rented from decides this is my fault, I’m out a $1500 deposit on top of everything else. It’s a low level possibility, but the way my tech karma’s been fucking with me lately, I wouldn’t be surprised.

I’m starting to think I should have just sucked it up and bought a new computer. At least then, among other things, I wouldn’t be typing this on my crackberry.

I had put my MacBook Pro on that counter before, a thousand times before. I had no reason to think last night was any different.

No reason until it came tumbling down, open, about 10pm last night. And that’s when today’s nightmare began.

I thought it was fine at first: Everything was working properly, no readily visible damage, at least not in the piss-poor lighting of my apartment.

I always work with my laptop on my lap, so the first, “Oh fuck” didn’t cross my mind until I put the laptop on the coffee table so I could get up and start doing my foot stretches. I noticed it wasn’t quite sitting level.

Okay, that’s not too bad, I thought. Then I tried to eject the DVD I’d been watching, and it bonked against the case in a futile fashion. Crap, that’s bad.

I decided to call and get some estimates in the morning. Taking it in to a reseller (who I thought might get me a better price than Apple directly, since Apple’s warranty doesn’t cover butterfingers), I noticed that when I closed it, the lid was obviously bent at a weird curve.

That was when I knew this was going to be REALLY expensive.

On any laptop, if you seriously damage something related to the casing around the screen, nine times out of ten you have to replace the whole screen, even if you’ve been lucky enough not to have the screen itself break on you.

Since the screen is one of the single most expensive parts of any laptop, and particularly expensive-ass MBP’s, this was going to cost me.

The reseller gave me an estimate in the mid $1300′s, but advised I go to the Apple store since they’d have to send it in to Apple for a repair that serious anyway, and perhaps I could throw myself upon their mercy and get something at least a little cheaper.

And a little cheaper it was: If I wanted to have all the damage repaired, rather than just the more egregiously fucked bottom part of the case (and the full repair is necessary to keep the warranty in force), it was $1240.

The good news is, the $1240 figure covers ANYTHING else they find wrong with it. If I fucked up the disk drive too, then that’s covered. If they have to just send me a whole new computer, it will still be $1240.

I would also be without my computer for anywhere from 5-10 business days, necessitating renting a temporary computer, since the only work I have right now is freelance tech consulting, for which you need a computer.

The only place they could find that would rent to individuals (as opposed to buisnesses) gave the fairly reasonable-for-these-things rate of $170 for two weeks.

So immediately, I would be out $1460. Considering the computer itself cost $2800, this was a fairly substantial sum. It is also, I’d like to note, more than my incredibly steep rent for one month.

And in case you’re thinking it, nope, renter’s insurance won’t cover it since it was a very obvious drop. If it’d been stolen or lost in a fire, maybe. Not dropped.

I briefly considered just bagging it and getting a new computer for the same money, but the problem is that I didn’t get the cheaper MacBook for a reason: I do audio recording which strongly benefits from more advanced ports (firewire 800 vs. 400), as well as web design and photo stuff that really needs the extra boost of the bigger screen and better graphics card.

Plus, the glossy screen drives me batshit to absolutely no end. I’d been helping a friend set up her new MacBook and had been ever more convinced I’d done the right thing springing for the Pro.

I probably could have sold the busted Pro for parts, but I had no idea if it’d bring in enough money (around $1000-1200) to pay for the difference between the cost to fix it and a new Pro. Without that knowledge, I was kind of up a creek.

So I sucked it up and decided to get it fixed. I’m now typing on the rented MacBook (which, by the way, is good for basic stuff but is heavily reaffirming my decision to just get the damn Pro fixed).

Now I will admit, I’m EXTREMELY fortunate that I have some deep-freeze funding that I’m being allowed to access (which I normally would not have access to, but the parental units who control it deemed this a worthy exception) to pay for this debacle.

I’d be super-duper-mega-extra fucked without that, and I’m REALLY not happy I had to access that in the first place, especially since this was due to my own carelessness.

Lord knows when the busted computer comes back from the shop, I’ll be velcroing the fucker to my desk/coffee table any time it’s not on my lap.

Being unemployed in January is probably a good thing for the average gadget geek like myself, since the twin peaks of lust for shiny things both take place during the first couple of weeks of January.

The Consumer Electronics Show (CES) is taking place in Las Vegas this week, where almost every electronics company is unveiling its product lineup for 2008.

Next week brings the annual MacWorld Expo, where Apple faithful come to drool over whatever lickably shiny object Steve Jobs deigns to unveil during his keynote address.

Both of these events lead to an absolute orgy of gadget blog coverage (Google Reader is buckling under the weight of the feeds just of Engadget and Gizmodo), and to try and keep up even without having a job to do on top of it is a bloody nightmare.

I mean, it is fun to read about crazy shit like the leopard-print Taser with mp3 playing holster, the LCD you install on your car bumper so other people can watch what you’re watching, or the 150 inch plasma TV that is over five times the size of my Gigantic Damn TV.

What would have been even better is to have seen these ridiculous items in person. Alas, it is not to be.

The thing that really sucks is that theoretically, if I had the money, I could have gone to both CES and MacWorld and at least gotten on the exhibit floors. This is also one of the very few times I would actually be able to attend either conference.

The problem is, between rent and COBRA, I’m burning through my unemployment checks completely before the first of the month is even over, and every other expense I have comes straight out of savings.

So burning $40-50 on admissions fees per conference plus approximately one billion dollars per tank on gas (just over two tanks to Vegas and back, more like three to SF) is not really in the cards.

I tell you, it is going to kill me next week to be sitting here, knowing that I could have been in San Francisco groping the goofy gadgets I’m simply staring at pictures of, but my stupid fiscal responsibility is winning out.

I hereby present a screencap of a brief conversation with a friend and former co-worker that I had yesterday that amused me greatly.

I am represented by the Santa chugging a bottle of Jack on the right, while my friend is represented by MacGyver.