Windshield Repair, Part 2: Windshield Repaired!

A couple people asked and since I started the story, it’s probably only good form to finish it. Plus, now when the 29th Century Blog Archeologists find this, they won’t be left hanging.

I got our cracked windshield replaced at Apple Auto Glass last Tuesday, and everything went as smoothly as I’d hoped. I showed up, dropped of the keys, gave them my insurance policy number, and left for work. At noon I got a call that things were done, went back, paid my deductible and drove away with my new windshield. Done.

I was impressed that the new windshield looks exactly like the old one. There was some extra urethane detailing on the original that I was a little surprised to see duplicated on the replacement, but (based on their invoice) I guess that’s part of what they do.

For future reference, the total cost of the replacement was about $850 including parts and labour. I assume that will vary depending on the particular windshield being replaced. Insurance covered the bulk of the cost, but we still had to pay the deductible, which will vary depending on your insurance policy. My broker told me that putting in the claim won’t affect my premiums, but that may be something else you want to double-check with your insurance if you’re debating whether to put in a claim or pay out of pocket.

2007
08/21
CATEGORY
life
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What I’ve Learned About Windshield Replacement (So Far)

Go to a place that specializes in replacing windshields. I picked Apple Autoglass, but there’s also Speedy and probably others. I haven’t even gotten the windshield replaced yet, so I’m sort of trusting that they’ve got that covered, but based on the five minutes I spent in their store today (compared to the hours I spent trying to get it done at our dealership), I’m convinced it’s the way to go.

We initially went to the dealership hoping that our only-a-week-old windshield would be covered by some sort of warranty. It wasn’t, but we were there and I didn’t see a reason to go find anywhere else to get the replacement done. As a result, I spent part of every day this week on the phone with my insurance broker and the dealership trying to sort things out.

Replacing an insured windshield is apparently supposed to go like this (from your perspective):

  1. You say “hey, I need my windshield replaced”
  2. The replacement people replace your windshield
  3. You pay the replacement people whatever your deductible is
  4. The replacement people put in a claim to your insurance company and get the rest of their money

As I’ve discovered, since the auto-glass people deal with insurance claims on a daily basis they’ve got things down to a science. When you wander in and mumble something about your insurance company only paying-out based on “NAGS” standard pricing – because that’s the extent of what you understood from your broker – they don’t bat an eye. They just ask for the name of your insurance company, call for pre-approval and everything is set to go.

On the other hand, an average dealership garage probably doesn’t deal with a whole lot of insurance claims (mine certainly doesn’t). They might know what “NAGS” is, but their price lists may not be up to date (my dealership’s weren’t), and they probably just generally don’t have as much experience handling all of the insurance things that you don’t want to bother dealing with yourself. I’ve been otherwise happy with their level of service, but they seemed (understandably, in retrospect) out of their element on this one.

2007
08/10
CATEGORY
life
1 comment

Burning Ring of Fire

I’m having a hard time with hardware these days.

Last week my new motherboard turned out to be defective (but was promptly replaced under warranty). This weekend the windshield on our new car developed a large crack, necessitating a whole new windshield (due to arrive sometime next week).

Now, it appears the latest Xbox 360 console upgrade has bricked my 360. Good’ol Red Ring of Death.

gaaaAAAAHHHHHGH.

2007
08/08
CATEGORY
hardware
toys
1 comment

Wedding Photos Have Arrived!

Cressa and I went and picked up our wedding photos from the photographer tonight. We got a DVD full of photos, two nice albums full of prints, and a DVD slide show. He also put together a web site for us, so you can see everything at www.cressaandjohn.ca.

Once again, if anyone’s looking for a photographer in the KW area, Alex did an excellent job for us and we couldn’t be happier with our photos.

The new computer is up and running, but Picasa and I are fighting over to what degree it’s going to keep track of my photos as I move them over. Once there’s a clear victor, I should have some more candids up in my Picasa gallery.

2007
08/07
CATEGORY
wedding
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All Systems Go!

New motherboard arrived today and is installed and working as expected.

Kudos to TigerDirect.ca for their customer support. Getting a replacement board was an entirely painless process (well, except for the having to take everything apart bit).

2007
08/02
CATEGORY
hardware
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Our New Car

After a couple delays, we finally got to pick up our new car from the dealership tonight!

First we had to say “goodbye” to the old car…

And then we said “hello” to the new car…

We only drove it to supper and back, so it’s hard to say much about it right now, but we’re looking forward to trying out all of the included toys. For thoroughly entertaining reasons that I won’t go into, it seems we’re now driving up to Kap this weekend, so the car will get a thorough breaking-in then.

2007
07/31
CATEGORY
toys
2 comments

Honeymoon, Days 6 & 7

I finally got through all of the pictures from the honeymoon and you can see them all in my Picasa Web Album.
Day 6 was our second big tour day and we went on the “Conveniently Late Cruise” that started at 11:00am. We could have slept in, except we’d somehow gotten into the habit of getting up at 8am and so had some time to kill (and caught a glimpse of a rainbow).

The cruise set out from Castries harbour and sailed South down the West side of the island. We went past the town of Canaries and Marigot Bay and eventually wound up in Soufrière. Soufrière is the oldest town on the island and is situated just north of St. Lucia’s landmark “Pitons” (for which, incidentally, their local beer is named). From their we caught a bus up to the “drive-in” volcano and learned an awful lot about St. Lucian geology from our tour guide, Acquinas.

After the volcano, it was back on the bus to visit a local plantation, where we had a buffet of traditional dishes for lunch, followed by a tour of the grounds. We had an explanation of how cocoa beans are harvested and processed and, of course, had an opportunity to visit their souvenir shop (approximately the 200th we’d been to so far on the trip).

The final destination for the tour was the “Diamond Botanical Gardens, Mineral Baths, Waterfall, Nature Trail, Old Mill & Waterwheel” where I snapped another inordinate number of photos of plants. We did, however, also get a nice picture of Cressa & me in front of the waterfall, and had a relaxing swim in the mineral baths (which, we were told, make you a full ten years younger!)

After the gardens, we got back on the boat and cruised North towards Castries. We took a tour around Marigot Bay (which, our tour guide informed us, was used for a scene in the 1967 version of Doctor Dolittle), and then returned to Castries and then our resort.

After our big day, we had some supper, walked on the beach for a bit, and then spent the rest of the evening packing.

Day 7 was pretty anticlimactic, but it has the distinction of being the only day where we had bad weather that lasted more than a few minutes. Most days it rained in the morning for half an hour before clearing up and getting really hot, but for our last day in St. Lucia it rained pretty steadily the entire day. Thankfully, all we had planned for the day was catching a ride to the airport and waiting for our flight, so it didn’t really bother us. I stopped taking pictures after we left the resort, so if you were hoping for exciting shots of airports and Atlanta hotels, you’re out of luck.

Anyway, that was our honeymoon. We haven’t got our wedding pictures from the photographer yet, but I have got a couple submissions from friends and family that I’ll be working to get up soon.

2007
07/29
CATEGORY
life
wedding
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EVGA 680i Motherboard Woes

I’m posting this from my new PC. So far I’ve tried out Supreme Commander and Dark Messiah of Might & Magic and both run beautifully. I’m excited to reinstall Oblivion and see how it looks with the new setup.

Alas, everything is not as wonderful as I would like and I’m probably going to have to take the whole thing apart again. It looks like my motherboard is baffed as it won’t POST with any RAM in either of the first two slots. I replaced the original RAM I bought with some better, faster RAM from Mushkin, tweaked the timing and voltages, and flashed the BIOS, all to no avail. The people in this forum posting didn’t seem to have much better luck and just ended up sending the board back for a replacement. After a couple support emails to EVGA (who, I will say, responded quickly to my questions), they told me to send it back as well.

A part of me just wants to ignore the problem, since the only real consequence of the two RAM slots not working is that I can’t take advantage of dual-channel goodness and, practically speaking, I’m probably not going to notice any performance differences. On the other hand, having jush shelled out $250 for a brand new piece of equipment, I shouldn’t have to settle for anything only half-working. I just need to figure out whether I send it back to TigerDirect or EVGA themselves.

As a heads up to anyone thinking about getting a EVGA 680i motherboard, while it does come highly recommended from a lot of places, if you have a look around the EVGA forums it appears a lot of people are having difficulties with it, particularly with RAM. It’s hard to tell if the problems are especially widespread, or if the people having problems are just especially loudspoken, but there are problems nonetheless. EVGA seems to be pretty good at sending replacements, but ideally you don’t want to have to send your hardware back in the first place.

I also didn’t realize this at the time I put in my order, but there are two different versions of the 680i motherboard, the “A1″ and the “T1″. They’re both supposed to be identical boards but the first comes with a lifetime warranty and a couple extra parts while the second comes with only a one year warranty. I, of course, have the second one. I’m going to try and see if I can exchange my defective T1 for a new A1.

2007
07/28
CATEGORY
hardware
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A New Addition to the Family

Monday I ordered my early birthday present from TigerDirect (discounted by my personal account manager, since they seem to have a very loose definition of “Business Account”). Hopefully by tomorrow I’ll be unwrapping and assembling:

  • An EVGA nForce 680i SLI Socket 755 Motherboard
  • An Intel Core 2 Duo E6600 2.4 GHz Processor
  • An EVGA GeForce 8800 GTS 640MB Video Card
  • 2x 1024MB sticks of Dual Channel RAM
  • A Seagate Barracuda 250GB SATA Hard Drive
  • A ThermalTake PurePower W0100RU 500-Watt Power Supply
  • A Logitech G5 “Gaming” Mouse

This marks the first time in a long while that I’m essentially buying an entirely new computer (minus a case and optical drive) rather than upgrading individual components. I’m looking forward to being able to keep my old PC around while assembling the new one, rather than scavenging it for parts.

I spent a little less on a couple things so I could spend a little more on some others and still keep the price reasonable. Quad-core CPUs can be had for not entirely unreasonable prices, but for the performance difference I’d see right now the extra $200 seemed better spent elsewhere. Modular power supplies strike me as being the way all power supplies should be, but for now the ones I saw were either more than I wanted to spend or reviewed poorly. I’ve been happy with ThermalTake’s PSUs in the past; maybe if I ever go crazy and upgrade to an SLI setup (and its concomitant power needs) I’ll go modular.

The one area I really splurged was the video card which cost about twice what I’ve ever paid for a video card in the past. While there’s not a whole lot enticing me to upgrade to Vista and DirectX 10 at the moment, I’m hoping that by investing in a pricier DX10 video card up front I’ll get a little more life out of my purchase.

It looks like while we were gone on our honeymoon, Jeff Atwood ran a series of articles on building your own machine. The last one included a recommended parts list and appeared shortly after I’d put my order in.  The important bits match pretty much what I ordered so I’m hoping I’ll be pretty happy with the new setup.

2007
07/25
CATEGORY
computers
hardware
2 comments

Honeymoon, Day 5

More pictures are up.

Day 5 (Sunday) was our first day with absolutely nothing planned. I did a tour of the grounds and snapped a lot of pictures of the local flora and fauna, we finally got around to drinking our complimentary honeymoon champagne, and we tried out “Morgan’s Pier”, the resort’s seafood restaurant, where we were visited by another one of the local cats.

On the way back to our room we encountered Gigantoad. I’ve seen bullfrogs as big before, just not usually sitting in the middle of the lawn.

Day six was a full-day cruse and I snapped 344 pictures, which I now need to trim down to a useful number, so it might be a couple days before I get around to posting those ones.

2007
07/22
CATEGORY
life
wedding
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