The lightning incident from last weekend has drawn to a close. The insurance company settled the claim within 24 hours of my reporting it.
I cashed the insurance company’s check on Friday, went shopping at Fry’s Saturday, and had installed everything today.

I’m thinking about buying a new printer. Right now, I have a desktop laser printer. I’ve been very happy with laser printers. They work fine with recycled papers, whereas inkjets waste a lot of ink on them. The recycled paper is kind of sponge like and absorbs the ink. The ink also scatters a little, which makes the image look fuzzy. Laser is always sharp. Best of all, the laser’s cost per copy is dirt cheap compared to the $350/gallon cost of ink jet ink.

Our skydiving show at Thunder Over Louisville got rained out. It’s also our last year.

Found out that it was a bad storm. The Modem and Firewall are fried, not just the power supply. The person taking the insurance claim was kind of clueless

Looks like I took a lightning strike while I was gone. Lots of computer stuff doesn’t work anymore.

Today I had to honk at another driver but later got to talk to them. It was an awkward, but interesting event.

I cancelled my XM radio for all the reasons I mentioned earlier. “Reason for cancellation” was one of the fields the customer service rep had, so I listed “displeased with Clear Channel as a corporate citizen” as the reason.

I think I’m going to turn off my XM-Radio service. I’ve kind of gotten tired of it, actually. It’s neat and all, but I’m not as excited about it as I was last year when I got it.

I received a credit card from Chase. I immediately called them, explained that I didn’t want it, and they told me they would cancel it and purge the records. The next month, however, the statement arrived with a single charge of over $800 from Macromedia. Chase responded to my letter by just sending a copy of my statement. I wrote numerous certified letters and they replied with form letters that didn’t addresses the issue. Finally, I gave up and just ignored them. A company called “Georgia Receivables” owned by a lawyer here in Atlanta bought them. They sued me for it. I did get some legal advice from several lawyers and was able to successfully defend myself. Georgia Receivables gave up and dismissed the case. Chase had placed a charge-off on my credit reports for the bogus account. Given that the amount wasn’t very much, it looked like I could not even afford the $19 “minimum monthly payment.” I sent each of the credit reporting agencies a letter explaining the situation. All three credit reporting agencies wrote me back and told me that they would only accept a change initiated by Chase and that they would not accept documentation from me.

I donated blood today and they had completely changed their computer and added a bunch of interesting questions.