conclusion drawn from one data point

When what turns out to be the hard drive starts making that "clunking" sound, you've got about three minutes to rescue what you were working on. (Fortunately, it was the secondary drive that I didn't really care about anyway.)

This is actually my very first personally-witnessed hard-drive failure. I had a drive die once when I wasn't home, and I had one get taken down by a failing power supply and another by a power surge (yes, through the surge protector), but I haven't seen this particular failure mode before.

(no subject)

Apparently I attract sales people who can't do math. So I made the car dealer redo the paperwork to correct the $110 error. Something similar happened at the closing for my first house, to the tune of $900. At least the car dealer squashed her annoyance that I was bringing it up, unlike the realtor.

When we were haggling over price we rapidly got to the point of talking about the bottom line, not price vs. trade-in. (I had proposed a $500 trade-in, which is fair per Kelly, along with my price bid.) I was amused to note that the final paperwork shows a higher price offset by a $1000 trade-in, with the same bottom line (after error-correction). I'm guessing that the manufacturer has some price-based incentives for the dealers and that trades aren't part of the equation. I decided that would be ok with me, as I was not asked to sign anything stating my belief in the appropriateness of the trade-in value.