Burn That Money!

I suspect I joined the ranks of the 'sufficiently wealthy to not sweat the small stuff' when I stopped noticing petrol prices very much. I would be vaguely aware of the total dollar amount when I filled up, but the choice of which petrol station to go to was largely dictated by 'do I need petrol right now?', rather than 'is this place 5 cents cheaper than the other place?'.

This is fine, and I can totally rationalise this to myself - reducing the number of trips to the petrol station is worth the extra dollar or two I might pay.

But I can cement exactly when the 'careless rich' threshold was reached, and it was yesterday. I was driving home along a route I don't normally take, and the fuel light was on. There are two petrol stations right next to each other on the same side of the road, a Shell and a 76. As I was approaching deciding which one to go to, I actually thought 'I like the Shell Logo better, let's go there'. It was only when I passed the 76 that I realised that I actually had the chance to look at the signs and go to the cheaper option at zero cost, but it had been so long since I'd done that that the thought didn't actually occur to me in time.

At this point, I was sufficiently embarrassed at myself, that I got flustered and drove past both. This made me feel like even more of a lame-o. I went to one further up the road - I have no idea if it was cheaper or more expensive.

Ha. I guess there's a good reason they call it 'Overcoming Bias' and 'Less Wrong', not 'Perfect Rationality'.

Athenios periodically accuses me of being 'part of the 1%', in his hilarious attempts to ignite class war nonsense, and I have no doubt this post will be catnip to him.

Like Raaaaaiiiiiinnnnnnnn, on your Wedddddiiiinnnggggg Daaaaayyyyyy

In honour of world backup day being a mere three days ago, the hard drive on my 8 month old Dell laptop decided to die.

The answer to the implied question is, of course, 'No'.

Unless the implied question was 'why on earth would you buy a Dell laptop', to which the answer is' 'if you've ever owned a Lenovo laptop, a Dell laptop seems like an awesome choice by comparison!'. Sure, neither of them work very well, but the Dell is a lot cheaper. The advice to get a Lenovo Thinkpad came from SMH, who had one when they were still the IBM Thinkpad, and his one was excellent. Yeah, the moral of that story isn't hard to figure out. Apparently two other friends of SMH got burned by the same advice though, so I don't feel like a total fool.

Fortunately, I've had enough computers die on me that my friendly IT guy at work left me with a copy of an Ubuntu CD to boot from and rescue as much as possible. Which, thankfully, looks like being most of it.

Good times, good times...