Today, I picked up my car from the Freedom Dodge Collision Center .  It was in the shop for just shy of four days.

Honestly, if you didn't know it had been hit, you wouldn't be able to tell the difference between my car and a brand new one.  They did a fantastic job!

Once again, I want to go on the record an say that the Traveler's Insurance Company , specifically Neil in the claims division, took very good care of me.  They were curtious, responsive, friendly and very quick.  Everything was taken care of for me with basically one phone call and Neil was very quick to point out that he was there to help me.

Suffice to say that all parties involved made me a very satisfied person. 

I'll try to post some pictures later...

And it happened today.  My brand new (less than 4 weeks) car was hit.

At lunch I drove to the McDonalds out on Winchester Road (the one closest to downtown) and parked my car in the lot.  I parked next to a KY. American Water Company work truck (a GMC TopKick, I think), got out of the car and walked into the restaurant.  While I was waiting in line, the driver of the truck backed out of the spot and basically scraped the front passenger side of my car.

He actually started to drive off.  (He thought that since the scrape was of a "grey color" that his white truck didn't cause the damage.)

Another person in the parking lot, noticed the accident and told me about it.  I went out and checked the car and waved the guy from in the truck down.  To his credit and integrity, he pulled back into the parking lot with just a simple wave of my hand.

His front bumper had scraped the front passenger side fender and the bumper of my car, removing the paint down to the primer/fiber/resin underneath.  This primer/resin was grey and that's why the scraped area looked like it had been done by a grey vehicle.  Here's a picture:

So, an hour later, with a police report in hand, I finished my lunch and came back to work.

Most anyone who knows me will tell you that I have no problem changing things - especially when it comes to my personal computers.  Over the past 10 years, I've had so many operating systems on my PCs that I really can't count them.  I know I've been through every Windows OS starting as far back as DOS 5, I've used Windows since version 3, I've even used a fair amount of Linux distros.

I've even used Vista - both in 2 betas and pre and post SP1. I must confess that I like a lot of things about Vista, but I hate one thing most of all: It's system requirements.

Now if you'll look at the box, Microsoft will tell you a very modest machine, by today's standards, will run Vista.  And to be truthful - it will. (I've had Vista running on a Virtual Machine with only 512 MB of RAM!)  But to be just as honest, you will not like the overall performance of Vista unless you have a killer machine.

Take my laptop for instance.  It's three years old and, for the most part, a very decent Windows XP machine.  It's got a Pentium M (Centrino) 2 GHz CPU and 2GB of RAM.  I've never complained about XPs performance on the machine.  But load up Vista on it, and this machine becomes a dog.  Everything works on the machine - so Vista being incompatible isn't the problem - it just runs about 25% slower.

While the machine is currently running Vista - for my testing and personal pleasure - I really would prefer to use any one of my desktops running XP instead.  I just don't want to deal with the LAG.

And then I read this on a ZDnet Blog, a quote from Brad Brooks, Corporate Vice President of Windows Consumer Products:

The message is "Move to Vista. The time of worry is over."

 That may be, but I would add one additional statement -"Only if you have a beefy machine!"

Saturday afternoon (around 1:30), while washing the car, I recieved a phone call from my sister.  The cell phone was in the car's cup holder and I didn't hear it ring.  A few minutes later the house phone rang.  It was my mom, she was in tears and all she could say was "Mother's gone."

I tried to ask for specifics, but she could tell me.  I tried to find out about arrangements, but she just kept saying "Mother's gone." I told her that I was sorry and I wanted to know when the visitation and funeral were.  I asked her to call me back once all of that was settled.

It wasn't until late Saturday night when I finally found out all the details.

Last week - around Wednesday - my aunt Audrey called 911 to have an ambulance take Granny to the hospital.  She hadn't been eating and what she was eating she couldn't keep down.  Within a day the doctors had decided that Granny's gall bladder was causing the problem.  So they set up the surgery for Friday morning.  Either late Thurday night or early Friday morning, Granny's heart rate shot up and her blood pressure when way down.  This cancelled the surgery.  The doctors began to run more tests.

Saturday morning, she was taken to have an Xray done.  After she was placed back into her room, she lasted about 15 minutes.  According to my sister, she was holding my uncle Charlie's hand.  Looked around the room.  Looked at Charlie and smilled.  Took one last breath and passed.

For the past couple of days, I've had a "Firefox Download Day" icon on the right menu of this site.  As you can see it's gone.  Why?

Well, appearently the spreadfirefox.com server is down (and a couple of other servers that allow access to the world's best browser) and it was causing my home page to timeout while trying to retrieve the graphics.  I'm sure this is being caused by a situation similiar to a Slashdotting - to much traffic for the servers and/or load balancers and/or bandwidth to handle.

This is both a good thing and a bad thing.  It's a good thing that everyone wants Firefox 3.  But it's a bad thing because they're trying for a world record amount of downloads.  If the people can't access it, then it's not getting downloaded.

At present, 2:29 Eastern, the site has been offline for at least 30 minutes.  I'm hoping this clears up soon, because I want to download it and get counted in the download day.