a) Windows toaster:

The windows toaster looks nice, but sometimes it just won’t make toast, it either comes out burnt or raw, or it stops half way through.  Also, you have to unplug the toaster, plug it back in again, and wait 5 minutes each time you want to try and make some toast.   For every loaf of bread you buy, you are forced to buy a license for a new toaster to go with it, and you will get sued if you let someone else have some of your toast.

b) MAC toaster:

The MAC toaster has no settings or controls and it looks very stylish, but will only accept proprietary size bread which can only be bought from Apple main dealers at 10 times the price of regular bread. If it breaks you will have to ship it to a licensed repair shop for service.   The toast is fine except that the size of the bread is so odd, you can’t actually eat the toast it produces, although it does look good.

c) Linux toaster:

The linux toaster looks awful, it has wires crimped together hanging out of it, and pieces grafted from other toasters.  The first time you make toast with it it burns it, the next time its raw, but after you read the man pages and invoke the command line, toast -verbose -breadsize 50132 -eject -o z3321 > /dev/toast | more, then it makes perfect toast forever and never breaks.

We were running low on food in the house so I went to Giant Eagle to get something for dinner.  This was around 6:15 PM or so.  I got about 100 feet away from my drive way and the car made a horrible noise and I came to an abrupt stop.  I new it was not an engine problem; I figured my right front tire blew out.  As I looked at the car from the front I noticed something disturbing.  The left tire was pointing left.  The right tire was pointing right.  This doesn’t usually happen.

The bracket that keeps the tires properly aligned had rusted through.  As I looked at it I figured it was a simple job to weld a new bracket in place and replace a small part or two.  I also figured if I took it to a dealer or just about anywhere they would say I needed $500 – $800 of work on it.

As Murphy’s Law predicted, my AAA membership ran out last month and I didn’t renew it.  Oops.  Fortunately my father-in-law let me use his.  As the tow truck was approaching, a car pulls up with two guys who look very interested in the situation.  They check out my car and within a few minutes it was being towed to Morgan’s Auto Service & Gas Tank.  Shane, the owner, had been one of the two men who stopped.  (What are the odds of that?)  After talking with him briefly I completely trusted his judgment.  He said (what I thought) that a simple bracket (that he custom made) could be welded in place to fix the problem.

This was around 6:45.   Just before 10:00 PM the same night I got my car back.  The work looks great, my car runs, I am very happy.  $150 well spent.  Shane’s business card says “Quality Service At A Fair Price”.  I completely agree.

Morgan’s Auto Service & Gas Tank   330-297-6890

A special thank you to his family who lets him work late.

As Lisa and I got ready for bed, we found this in the living room.  (Cute, Caleb.)

“The software works by adding itself to the clipboard viewer chain. When the clipboard is updated, the software saves the current content to a temporary file. Users have the option to preview previous clipboard items or set previous items back to the clipboard. Clipboard Recovery supports graphics and text, and has an unlimited amount of previous items to recover.”

Watch this video for more.