Kyle Smith

For a while there it didn’t look like 2004 would end well, but things have picked up this past week.

I finally heard from Progressive on Wednesday and learned that my car was totaled, so I spent the afternoon visiting car dealerships. I ended up getting a 2004 Pontiac Grand Am which is almost identical to my Alero in terms of features and is identical in terms of the body (they’re the same car just different brands and prices). Maybe tomorrow I’ll put up some photos of it.

Yesterday was my first chance to really drive it when Adam and I went to Burlington for New Years. We had planned to check out some of the First Night activities but ended up spending the entire evening at the Vermont Pub and Brewery where I sampled just about everything on the menu (with the exception of their hard cider and their IPA).

Other than that my week has been filled with quite a bit of reading [1, 2, 3], movies [1, 2,3,4], and music [1].

One thing that peeved me was the poor customer service Apple has for the iTunes Music Store. I recently discovered that all of the music I’ve purchased that’s older than a couple of months won’t play on my desktop machine because iTunes thinks that it was purchased using a different account (it wasn’t, and the machine has been authorized to play it anyway). After waiting a couple of days for a response I received a lovely canned reply pointing me to two knowledge base entries I’d seen and found to be of no help. I even mentioned that those two specific entries didn’t solve my problem when submitting the ticket. Part of the problem might be that some of the tracks were decrypted and iTunes might not be matching the owner info properly, so now I need to figure out how to rescue a few dozen (or a few hundred) songs I purchased.

And in some other bad news, it’s almost time to return to school. The return trip to Potsdam is happening Wednesday. If I were truly fortunate Residence Life will have not filled Jim’s newly-vacated space in our apartment.

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