counting coins

i’m a bit of a nomad. i think i’ve lived in 15 different apartment since i moved out at 17, and it’s entirely possible i’ve missed one or two places. it should come as no surprise that i’m moving again.

this post isn’t about moving.

when i get home i always empty my pockets. little bits of paper and coins mostly, and they all get dumped on the nearest available surface. the paper ends up either shredded, filed, or thrown out with my infrequent bouts of tidying, the coins get stashed in the nearest available coin vessel. it started with an old plastic ice cream container, when that filled up i grabbed an old juice jug, which eventually spilled over into other containers over the last decade or so.

today, while packing i drew the line, no more. not again. i would not move those damned coins into yet another apartment.

instead i emptied all the various coin collecting vessels into a fabric shopping bag and realized that i had perhaps waited five years too long to get this done.

I had 40 pounds of pennies, nickles, dimes, some quarters, maybe a couple loonies and toonies.

in my head i always knew i had lots of change lying around, but holy shit batman. how much were they worth?

$258.32

unbelievable! that’s after a 9.8% service charge too.

the responsible thing to do would be to put this money down on my student loans, but a certain friend keeps on telling me that i _need_ to get an xbox 360.

maybe one of the six people who read my blog have suggestions on what i should do with this windfall?

so i’ll never be a professional blogger

seriously

people talk all about the democratizing potential of easy publishing of your thoughts, but heck, sometimes you just don’t have anything interesting to say.

a quick update i guess, got my replacement nano, thinking of buying carbon offsets for the stupid fact that although the apple repair depot is less than 50km’s from my home they decided to ship me a brand new one all the way from china. i guess everything comes from china now, but it makes you feel extra guilty when you see the fedex tracking data on your individual bit of mass manufactured consumerism crossing the world just for you.

looking for a good skin for the nano, i don’t really think i want to have to post about a broken nano twice (and i somehow doubt that apple will replace one again [even though i still think it’s a design flaw that a portable device breaks so easily]). any recommendations? so far i haven’t even found any in stores, so if you spot a review for skins for the new nanos i’d appreciate a link in a comment.

oh and just to prove there’s no hard feelings between me and apple, i bought myself a new macbook… you know, just cause i’m nice like that, i didn’t want apple to think i was _really_ mad at them.

sad day – my nano is broken

sigh – tomorrow it’s off to the apple store to see if they’ll replace this. i measured, it fell all of 2 feet, a portable device should not suffer catastrophic failure from such a relatively minor fall.

i’ll post tomorrow with the results of my beg-a-thon at the apple store

d_c

UPDATE:

i went directly to the apple store today and was unsuccessful in convincing them to help me. i guess i shouldn’t be surprised, the folk at the store aren’t exactly empowered to fix customer relations issues.

i’m on the phone with apple support, the 1st level tech, after seeing this photo, told me “that should not happen with an ipod no matter how far it drops” and i’m currently on hold waiting for the 2nd tier support who has the authority to do something about this. cautiously optimistic that apple will fix this problem.

UPDATE 2:

need to call back tomorrow and get in touch with customer relations. =(

UPDATE 3:

Apple will repair my ipod, but i did have the misfortune of having to talk to the crabbiest person at Apple (Janet from customer relations). they’re going to ship me a box, i’m going to put the nano in it, and at some undetermined point in the future i should get my purple nano back… after which i will go out and buy myself one of those rubberized cases. in the meantime, i’ll use my first gen ipod nano, the one that is damn near indestructible. 

so, consider my story a warning, the new nanos are beautiful but extremely FRAGILE

just bought yet another domain name

sometimes really great ideas are the result of just little off-hand comments or jokes… well at least that’s the theory.

joking around with a friend after dinner tonight i’ve got a great idea for a stupid little site that should get me using my camera again. just got to setup a domain and do a little wordpress install and customization, hopefully i’ll start posting next week.

what’s the idea you ask? it’s a surprise =P