I Own A Daewoo :(

Monday, June 23rd, 2008 | Life | 6 Comments

Yes, it’s true. I decided to buy a cheapie car. From pimped out mini cooper to…. a Daewoo.

I will miss the mini, but for the next 2 years I will enjoy the $500 a month residual income that it will provide me.

So from an expensive car to one that I paid $1300 for. Yep that’s right. 2000 Daewoo with less than 76000 miles on it, and it only costs $1300.

I will need to recharge the A/C, find a hubcap (1 is missing), put new speakers in it (1 of them works, but it has a rather large pen sticking out of it…), and clean the stickiness outside of car (lets hope it was from soda).

It also doesn’t have cruise control, in Arizona there is no need, however I will be annoyed if I have to take a road trip.

Oh… So George Carlin died today… Yeah, I know that sucks… and has nothing to do with my shitty new car, but it was also shitty so I thought of it.

Grr, my foot still hurts. I thought I found the cure for Gout last night, but it came back. bastards….

My Car Debacle

Friday, June 20th, 2008 | Life | 1 Comment

Ok, so good move on my part. Move to New Zealand for 2 months and during that time sell my car to somebody who will pay for it for 24 months.

It actually seemed like a good idea. I mean I am a legal lien holder on the title and it can’t be sold without me being paid off first. I get $500 USD a month in residual income, which pretty much pays my rent wherever I go. Yep, just for selling a car.

Well I got back to America and I had no car… Also due to expensive plain tickets that pulled from the wrong accounts etc.. (grr, overdraft was setup to not pull from my savings but from my credit card as a cash advance) I am fairly low on spending cash.

So I thought I could get my mini cooper back. Talked to the guy who bought it and offered most of what he had paid for it to get the car back. Hesitant at first he agreed to do so.

However we kept talking and he mentioned that he still hadn’t sold his old car. So me, enjoying the residual income though of a perfect solution. I bought his car, a 1993 Ford (Anal) Probe with 170k miles for a $900 reduction on what he owed me for the car.

Now I was informed that it was only internal cosmetic issues with the car and that it ran fine. So I gave it a full tank of gas ($58) and then drove it to the emissions place since this is required in Arizona before you can title a car into your name. Well it failed the emissions… 3 different tests failed!!! This pretty much means that the catalytic converter needs to be replaced since it was SUPER high on NOX etc..

Well this and my friend had done a quick list of things that he noticed that needed to be replaced. Some of which included the radiator, and both cv joints on the front, as well as it had some kind of weird idle where sometimes it idles at 2000 and sometimes at 1000 and power stearing sometimes works, and sometimes doesn’t…

Needless to say i was pissed off, I mean I would have fixed all the cosmetic crap and the cv joints without making much hassel but when the emissions thing happened and I can’t even title the car until it’s fixed, I suddenly don’t want anything to do with this stupid Anal Probe.

The owner agreed to take car back but still didn’t want to give me my mini cooper back. He said he would do it because he didn’t want me to try to screw him over (since there are worse things than death and I can do them all), but he didn’t really want to and legally he didn’t have to. So I told him it was fine and so long as he took the old POS back that I would just find another car.

Well this is great in theory. I mean I will keep getting my rent paid for a couple years, but now I still don’t have a car and without a car I can’t do mobile pc repair OR get another job.

So I am actively looking for a non-shitty car for around 1500… Yeah… I know, but whatever, I mean I am not trying to replace the mini cooper, but to make life easier so I can spend more time working on my website.

Gout, A Pain in the Foot

Friday, June 20th, 2008 | Life | 3 Comments

You know how a doctor looks at some test results at one point and says “wow, you are really healthy… except you do have really high uric acid levels, you should really work on changing your diet to change that so that you don’t end up with Gout”.

Well you ignore him because doctors are stupid and who the fuck are they to tell you what you can and cannot eat!?

That was my experience. Basically I have a shitty metabolism and my body is too acidic, so uric acid builds up in the joints. Most often the big toe joint. Odd, I know.

But DAMN does it suck. I mean I haven’t been able to walk properly for days. I had to pay a doctor $110 for the visit just to get him to prescribe me some drugs, which to my dismay he only gave me percoset and shit to deal with the pain, and nothing to actually lower uric acid levels.

Lucky for me I know how to browse the internet and have been trying to reduce my foods that cause excess uric acid and have been drinking cherry juice etc… It still hasn’t gone away, but it’s better than it was the other day.

I mean having shit like this takes away all motivation. Oh I can’t move my food… or even if I don’t move it the damn things still hurts and you can’t sleep because of the constant stabbing pain.

So what am I supposed to do? Eat less red meat, stop eating shell fish, cut out yeast based products and things with high protein and purine. Stop drinking alcohol etc…

Yeah, it sounds like some bullshit to me 2. Grr…

Why NOT To Move To New Zealand

Friday, June 20th, 2008 | Life | 3 Comments

Well as you probably noticed I am no longer living in New Zealand. I was given a 12 month holiday visa and I only choose to use 2 months of it. Pissed away a ton of money on the return trip flight too (1 way from NZ to PHX = $1000 USD and that was after a lot of looking).

Ok, so you want to live in New Zealand… That’s cool… I will tell you if it will or will not work for you.

First: How hardcore of an internet user are you? I mean do you watch a ton of movies online and download all your favorite TV Shows from the net commercial free? If so then New Zealand hates you.

Don’t believe me? There is no competition on most things in New Zealand. No cellphone competition, no internet competition. Sure there are other internet providers but all of them have the same backbone. That backbone isn’t very fast and charges a LOT for bandwidth, so all the companies push on that cost to their customers.

I was able to get the “MAXIMUM ULTRA-FAST SPEED” of 3 megs (haha, ultra-fast my ass). However when I paid for that 3 meg connection they capped the downloads at 6 gigabytes. Then anything I downloaded beyond this automatically charged me for a 3 gigabyte data block. Basically even with me trying to use less internet than I normally would it cost me $150 a month extra in just bandwidth charges.

Then the bandwidth monster further ate holes in my wallet. I signed up for a Vodaphone contract, (there are only 2 cellphone providers in NZ and that’s the one 95% of everybody uses… again no competition), and being a smartass I wanted to use my iPhone.

So I unlocked my iPhone and slapped the newest software on it, and walah. I had something that virtually nobody in New Zealand had.

Well fat lot of good that did me. Seems my iphone was set to auto-check my email every so many minutes, and when it does that vodaphone’s network charges me 10c just for accessing the internet, and then it costs $10 a megabyte for bandwidth. No, that number was not a joke, and no there was not any option for unlimited internet usage.

So after a month of having my email checked now and then by my phone and also pulling up Google Maps (100% necessicary in Auckland) to find your way around, I spent $250 on my phone bill (and that was only 30 mins of talk time). Seems that I had to pay $150 for 15 megabytes of bandwidth and then a shitload of fees (least of which is 12.5% GST for everything).

Ok, so perhaps I am not a typically internet case. I run a website that’s all about burning the shit out of your bandwidth… because you can.

So lets look at other things. How about importing goods. Surely a friendly island nation has lots of trade agreements with other countries to bring goods in. I mean it’s needed since you can’t produce everything you need right?

Well it seems that kiwi’s don’t know what they are missing and have learned to live with the small amount of crap they have. However the rest of the world moves there and then goes broke importing goods. It costs over $500 USD to import 50lbs of stuff from America. Then once it gets here customs goes through it and assesses GST (Goods and Services Tax), which is always 12.5% of the value of the items.

So if the items were honestly reported, or insured by the party who sent them you will have to pay a ransom fee. I myself had to pay $125 just to get a motherboard and processor that my friend had been kind enough to reship to me.

Ok, so if you are rich and don’t need any faster of an internet connection than 3 megabytes (supposedly in Christchurch there is a nice expensive 10 megabyte connection, though there wasn’t in Auckland…), then maybe you really would like living in New Zealand.

I mean it’s gorgeous and well… the women there are really easy to pick up once you get the hang of it. It’s also a great place to eat Pizza and Asian food. I mean you need to really like Asian food because every single place that we have a mexican food place; they have an Asian food place.

Be warned though, they have taken all of our American phrases and “cleaned them up” to remove the “potty mouth” aspect of it and make them more politically correct.

Example 1) Sweet Ass !!! (USA) | Sweet As ! (NZ) [Um... Sweet As what???? lame]
Example 2) Assume makes an ass out of u and me! (USA) | It’s just bad to assume. (NZ) [FYI: Saying this phrase in the American way seems to offend some people in NZ because it's so Trite and Vulgar]

There is also virtually no instant food except for pies. Now this is cool for people who like to cook, but if you are lazy (if you are an American, it’s not a far stretch) then you will need to like Asian food since it’s the only thing available for takeout in most areas.

Ok, so you are rich, you love Asian food, are thrilled at the possibility of easy loose women, think that Americans are too vulgar, you like adventure and don’t need high speed internet. Well then New Zealand IS for you.

My recommendation is to pack REALLY light and then live in the hostels, moving from place to place. I went to a hostel in Rarotonga and it was fantastic (and only $17 a day). Basically I had instant friends.

The way I went is I packed up my projection tv / ps3 etc.. and took them to New Zealand and then I moved in to a house with other people (where I was overpaying rent). In retrospect, the next time I travel no matter how long I plan to be gone I will not bring expensive toys like that so I can better move from place to place and meet other people faster.

The Crap people email me.

Friday, June 20th, 2008 | Life | 5 Comments

Can you believe the crap people email me on a daily basis? I mean am I a known resource for dealing with stupid people? I get at least 5 emails a week like this, but this time I was encouraged to publish it. So let the public embarrassment begin:

hay man i really need help i was being stupid and download some anti vires softwere that in the end i have to pay for my first request is help me get ride of them there macking my computer really slow and my secound is that is there any good anti vires softwere thats free with no bull shit? that would really help a lot becase im ready to throw my computer out the window. its an xp.

CASEY