The Best Money I’ve Spent…
Every day I hear about people making both good and bad choices when they purchase stuff, everything from computer software to electronics. I thought I’d highlight where I think I’ve best spent some of my money:
- HP LaserJet 4 Plus — Purchased in June 1995, this printer has been an incredible workhorse. It’s been in the shop only once, the result of a much-needed cleaning. Less than a year ago, I bought a repair kit on eBay to replace the rollers which had been causing occasional paper jams, purchased an extra legal-sized paper tray, and upgraded it to 18MB with an extra SIMM I had laying around. It’s been 13,126 pages so far, and I expect to get another five or more years out of this terrific printer.
- Norton Anti-Virus 2001 — The fact that Norton Anti-Virus caught 13 viruses (virii?) in the past few months by intercepting suspect emails has made it worth every penny I paid for it, ten times over. Of course, I increased the automatic update and scan rates to daily for maximum protection to achieve those stellar results. [NOTE: I have long since moved away from Norton and its bloated software, but it was the best in its class for many years.]
- Agushka Backgammon for the Palm Pilot — I normally don’t buy shareware software because it’s often mediocre at best, but this has been the best $15 I’ve ever spent on shareware. I play at Level 4, the highest level, and the games poses a decent challenge as an opponent. My Palm currently shows that I’ve played 351 games although the real number of games played is much higher because I once had to perform a full reset on my Palm (thanks to a bad piece of shareware!) and I lost the game statistics. Sadly, Agushka Backgammon doesn’t back up the scores, and it decides when you’re allowed to double the betting cube. Despite the fact that I am convinced that the game cheats by looking ahead at dice rolls and moves (far too many coincidental betting doubles right before it gets an awesome roll), it is still a joy to play.
- HP-16C Calculator — Hewlett-Packard gets its second winner with this awesome calculator I purchased in 1983. Almost twenty years and only three sets of batteries later, my 16C is still going strong despite my two-year-old’s best efforts. Admittedly, I get a little puzzled every now and then trying to get it out of some weird mode he gets it stuck in. It’s the only programmer’s calculator HP made, displaying numbers in binary, octal, decimal, and hexadecimal. It also had a whopping 203 bytes of memory, shared between registers and program storage. Nowadays, Microsoft Word can’t even store the letters “HP” in less than 203 bytes…
- MovableType — Last, but certainly not least, this Blogger-like content tool is the best money I never had to spend. It, too, is shareware. richard’s ramblings… is written using MT2.0 and I’ve recommended it to several people interested in creating their own websites. Vignette Content Suite it is not. But then, thankfully, neither is it Microsoft FrontPage. If all you want is a place to publish your own ramblings then this is the package for you. It’s flexible and highly customizable, but it helps to know HTML and CSS very well. I appreciated their candor in marketing their product: “Before you pay make sure you’re actually going to use the product. Give yourself some time to get used to the new system. See what others are doing with [it]. Ask yourself what you think the system is worth.” I couldn’t afford to pay them what I think it’s worth, so I gave them the suggested $20 instead. [NOTE: I've upgraded my blog to the far-superior WordPress blogging system, but I am still thankful to MovableType for introducing me to the concept of blogging.]
