It’s been almost a week, and I finally have an estimate for repairs: $8900.

Hoy moly. And no, that doesn’t include getting new parts for everything (or most things). Pretty shocking - I really thought it was going to be $5000ish.

It looks like I’ll be driving my rental car around for another few weeks! Speaking of which, I managed to trade in the Ford Mustang that Hertz gave me for a car with 4 doors:

The 2 door nature of the Mustang really bugged me since my parking spot at home was pretty tight, and I had trouble getting in and out of it. It’s a lot easier with this 4 door Volvo. And quieter too - I think the Mustang was permanently set to be in 2nd gear. The Volvo handles pretty well, and the seat is pretty comfy. I also like the key!

One nit about this Volvo though: for a brand that’s so associated with safety, I’m a little disappointed that the mirrors are so much worse (smaller) than the Mustang.

Update: I got the full estimate. Both headlamps need to be replaced. Each one is $805. Well that explains part of the price.

It was bound to happen, after 6.5 years of daily driving to work - and for the last year and a half, passing one of the more frantic interchanges in the Bay Area.

Those of you familiar with Highway 85 at 237 would probably grok what happened right way. That area is dangerous every morning - cars trying to exit the freeway (to 237) which is often backed up to a standstill, while cars are trying to enter the freeway right behind it (from El Camino), while cars are flying by on the other lanes of 85. And if that weren’t bad enough, cars cutting in add an additional level of chaos. I think the responding CHP officer said that he had this “pre-sketched”. I wouldn’t be surprised if there were a template for this - nearly every day I see near misses. The tow truck driver said that he was just there last week. The Merc has this as #9 of the 12 Worst Interchanges in the Bay Area.

Fortunately, there were no injuries. Phew.

While I was at the auto body shop, the person there tried to cheer me up by noting that at least my car wasn’t total-ed. She pointed out some cars that were total-ed. They were in bad shape: roofs crushed in. Apparently, 2 of the worst damaged cars were due to the driver falling asleep. A sobering reminder of how being drowsy while driving is truly dangerous.

Under the rules for the Bank of America Financial Rewards credit card, you get 1 point for every $100 you spent.
I got my statement for the last billing period today, and this is what it said:

New Balance Total: $95.31

Financial Reward Points Earned this Period: 0

Now, that’s perfectly fair because that’s what the rules state. But it certainly doesn’t make me feel good about using this card.

My current favorite credit card is the Citibank PremierPass Elite Mastercard. First the drawback: There’s a $75 annual fee. That’s not so cool. But this is why it’s awesome: you get points for every mile flown on tickets you bought with the card - even if it’s for other people.

So when I went to Rome last month, I bought the tickets for my fiancee and I using this card. Here’s how it worked out:

• American Airlines AAdvantage Program: Stack o’ Miles
• Citibank PremierPass Elite: $Price of 2 tix + 2 x Stack o’ Miles

You also get 2x the points for gas, supermarket, and drugstore purchases.

Even better, during the holidays, they were offering $50 gift cards for certain stores like Macy’s, Banana Republic, etc for 4500 (read: $45) points.

(There’s also buy one get one free airline tickets, but I’m not interested in that program because you have to use their ticket agency.)

Let’s just say that I easily made back the $75 in annual fees thanks to the bucket of points I had from flying to Rome. By a lot. And there’s rounding down like the first credit card.

If you’re interested in this card and would like to give me referral credit, zap me an e-mail.

Mac Mojo : Microsoft Announcements at Macworld ‘07
It’s Coming: Mac BU Announces Intent to Deliver Office 2008 for Mac
Microsoft Corp.’s Macintosh Business Unit (Mac BU) today revealed at Macworld Conference & Expo 2007 the news Mac fans have been waiting to hear: A new version of Office for Mac is on its way. The Mac BU announced its intent to deliver the first Universal version of Office for Mac for PowerPC- and Intel-based Macs — Microsoft® Office 2008 for Mac. Scheduled to be available in the second half of 2007, Office 2008 for Mac will allow Mac users to work smarter and more efficiently with new and enhanced tools that are simple, intuitive and easily discovered.

Congrats to the MacBU on this announcement. I’m super excited to see how this turned out - especially the My Day feature!

Congrats to Apple today for introducing the long awaited iPhone. It looks like it’ll be another few months before it gets into the consumer channel - but it looks pretty slick. I’m curious to try it out.

That said, there’s been a lot of hubbub today about how the iPhone will work with Yahoo to deliver push email. Here’s an example:

Business 2.0 Beta: Apple Favors Google and Yahoo, Freezes Out Microsoft
But Apple’s new iPhone was a vivid demonstration of what life in a post-Microsoft world looks like.

Google (GOOG) for search, Yahoo (YHOO) for email, iTunes for music, and the Mac’s address book software for contacts - there’s no need for Microsoft software on the Web, on the desktop or even on the back end. Yahoo (YHOO) cofounder Jerry Yang pointedly mentioned that his company’s push-email solution, unlike the competition, doesn’t require installation of a Microsoft Exchange server.

(emphasis mine)

If I read this morning’s news right, the iPhone will be supporting IMAP - and will be communicating with Yahoo Mail via IMAP.

Guess what: IMAP has push capability baked into the protocol. It’s called IDLE, and it appears to have been published around June 1997. Here’s a link to RFC 2177.
Having worked on an e-mail client before, and as one of the few people who use IMAP extensively today - I’m mildly amused that this feature has finally broken through the noise.

It’s only taken 10 years.

I noticed this interesting statement tonight while reading this editorial column on possible directions for digital music:

Wired News: Who’s Killing MP3 and ITunes?
6. People love AllofMP3.com

There’s already a case study of what an MP3 store could look like: the Russian site AllofMP3.com, which people are still reporting access to, despite attempts to starve it of U.S. credit cards. Its popularity also indicates that digital music pricing should drop (a 10-cent to 25-cent per unprotected MP3 sounds about right to me).

(boldfacing, mine)

In case you’re not familiar with AllOfMp3.com, you might want to visit the wikipedia entry on it. The long story short is that it sells songs for less than $0.12 each and its legal operating ability in Russia is in dispute.
Whether or not you agree that this service is legal or illegal doesn’t really matter - let’s just focus on the 12 cents per song part part. iTunes charges 99 cents per song. A CD is about $16.

Now, let’s go back to the part of the editorial that caught my attention:

Its popularity also indicates that digital music pricing should drop (a 10-cent to 25-cent per unprotected MP3 sounds about right to me).

If I’m reading this correctly, it appears that it is being suggested that pricing of songs should be based on what consumers want to pay. But then, it’s proposed that the price should be 10-25 cents.

But wouldn’t the service be even more popular if the price were a penny? Just think of the volume.
Or even better yet - why not just price it for free? That’s be a huge hit!

I think there’s some opex that’s being overlooked here - but that’s just me.

This is stuff that people usually do at the end of the year, but this recent rash of comments have inspired me to share with you the Most Commented Post on this blog.

So back in September 2005, my fiancee received an iPod Nano. A question came up: is it possible to delete songs directly from the device without having to use iTunes?

FWIW, the answer is no.

But it seems that I wasn’t the only person who wondered about this. To date, there have been 44 comments - mostly unhappy - about this exact same issue.

So, Apple - here’s a free suggestion: maybe you should allow deleting of songs from the iPod itself. Maybe make it a secret feature - you know, hold down two buttons at the same time and have it prompt the user.

Just a thought.

Omar’s been futzing with different backup strategies lately, so I’ll share mine. My solution is based around a few requirements:

• Not a subscription - no more monthly/annual fees.
• Distributed geographically - California has earthquakes.
• Provides incremental backups.
• I don’t have to do anything. It just works.

I’ve been using my solution since November 2004 and it’s worked out pretty well. This is basically how it works:

1. My important documents, photos, and music files are synced via FolderShare (P2P) between my desktop computer at work, my laptop, my desktop computer at home, and a $150 machine I bought from ebay in my parent’s basement in Long Island, NY. FolderShare is frickin’ awesome - whenever you add/change/delete a file, it automatically replicates it to all the other machines.
2. The PC in my parent’s basement performs an incremental backup to itself 4 days a day using an old copy of Retrospect that I bought.

That’s it!

Here’s a gratuitous diagram that shows FolderShare at work (red dotted lines):

Why the PC in NY? Well, obviously there’s the geo-thing: what are the chances of an earthquake leveling California and a hurricane that destroys NY in the same week? Also, FolderShare is so efficient that if you make some changes to a file that you didn’t intend - it replicates the those changes to all your other machines. With the PC in NY, I can revert to a version of the file from earlier in the day.

My fiancee and I share a FolderShare library as well, and that’s also shared to the PC in NY so it also gets backed up. Basically, anything that I want backed up is shared with this PC.

Aside from backups, the PC in NY is actually useful for work purposes from time to time as it’s not behind any proxies. Earlier this year, I needed to check a file that was on our website, but we weren’t sure if our proxies were caching it - so I RDP’ed into my PC in NY and checked it out. (And sure enough, it was a proxy problem.)

Finally, I get free monitoring - the other day my dad called me because the PC in NY’s hard drive didn’t make any noise at 11pm like it usually does. It turns out that it had gotten stuck rebooting due to some automatic update. One hard reset later, it was back to normal.

Well, there you have it - my backup strategy.