Some good news!
EPautos officialy welcomes AMSOIL Dealer Vic Sorlie as our latest advertiser. I am personally as well as professionally happy about this – because while it’s nice to have another advertiser, it’s even nicer to have an advertiser whose products I can personally vouch for and recommend to you. I use AMSOIL in my vehicles. Just as I have a V1 perched on the dashpad of every car I drive. Much as I like to make money, I will never shill for a product or service I don’t use myself – and know to be top drawer. The new AMSOIL ad is live on the right-hand side of the EPautos.com main page. Please click – and check out what they’ve got to offer!
In addition to car engine oil, AMSOIL also sells gear oil for manual transmissions/transfer cases and rear axles as well as their own ATF-style fluid for gearboxes that specify Dexron III or similar ATF. See here for more. And if you check their prices, you’ll discover they’re not appreciably higher than what you’d pay for other high-end lubricants such as Mobil 1 (which, by the way, won’t – or hasn’t yet, as far as I know – submitted their stuff to a direct, side-by-side third party test vs. AMSOIL).
Anyhow… there’s that.
On the not-so-great side of the ledger, I’m sweating the pie chart again. Take a look yourself and see what I mean. We’re not quite halfway where we need to be – and we’re about two-thirds of the way toward Feb. It’d be great if we could keep the trend going (three months’ running now) and end January in the black rather than the red. I’ve possibly found some tech support – but of course, he (like me) needs to earn a living. Which means I’ll need to pay him.
And as things stand, I can’t afford to do that.
And there is still the computer problem. My slow-running, apparently terminal hard drive’s gradual slide into the Great Beyond (or wherever dead computers end up). The damned thing croaked this morning – or I thought it had. Endless “spinning ball”… could not get it do anything. So I unplugged it – it was the only way to break the hold of said spinning ball. Then re-start. Only it didn’t. Blank screen. I did it again – and then it (with what I felt was reluctance) eventually booted back up. The thing is old and tired (like me) and I (like me) could croak for good at any time. In which case, EPautos will be in a pinch.
So, here we go: Please help us continue being Clover’s worst enemy.
Our donate button is here.
If you prefer to avoid PayPal, our mailing address is:
EPautos
721 Hummingbird Lane SE
Copper Hill, VA 24079
PS: EPautos stickers are free to those who sign up for a $5 or more monthly recurring donation to support EPautos, or for a one-time donation of $10 or more. (Please be sure to tell us you want a sticker – and also, provide an address, so we know where to mail the thing!)
What type of computer and what type of specs are you looking for?
Hi Preacher,
Just the base model iMac (Apple)…. I know, I know… but I am not computer hip and dealing with a PC (learning how one works) makes my teeth ache…!
Congrats on your new advertiser Eric!
A new imac is still your best choice. I know your old one is annoying you as much as my old imac is annoying me, but most windows PCs never even get to this age (though I wish I could still get 10 years out of one). Windows come with so much bad baggage as well.
Apple is really the only choice for those of us that use computers as an tool or an appliance. The computer business still doesn’t understand that computers are still too complex and too unreliable for most people yet. Imagine if refrigerators or garage door openers were complex for no good reason. No one would use them or complain about them a lot more. People give computers way too much latitude when it comes to usability (or its lack of it).
In a lot of ways, the computer biz is like the car biz. Cars were once hard to drive and many were not very reliable. Now they are and most are easy to drive. Even though they are far more complex then they once were (due in part to the computers hmmmmmmmm).
Agreed, Rich!
Macs are more stable – and much easier to use for people who (like me) who want self-explanatory function. PCs have – as you know – tried to emulate the basic Mac way of doing things (icons on a desktop you click on to open) but the PC way is much clumsier, with additional steps and processes one never needs to deal with when using a Mac.
This is the longest I’ve gone without having a new(er) machine on hand, though.
In the past, I’d update one of the two I have (a desktop primary and a laptop back-up) on a staggered basis, so that one of them always had fairly low miles – so to speak. Then I’d retire the high miles one with a new one… and so on. This way, I always had one “for sure good” machine in the event the other croaked on me.
But now – due to money pressures – both my desktop and laptop are getting seriously long in the tooth. The laptop is effectively useless because it’s one of the last Macs before the Intel processor and can’t be updated to the newer (or even recent) OS. I can check e-mail with it and do some basic things. But – among other things – it will only load a weird-looking/incomplete version of this site (admin area) which renders working (writing/editing/formatting) virtually impossible. The desktop is new enough that I’ve been able to update the OS to fairly recent (10.6.8) but it has a bad case of “the slows” and I am freaked out about the hard drive singing its death song.
I was chatting with another Libertarian journalists the other day (Bill Buppert) about the difficulties of making a living outside the MSM. It’s a problem almost all of us – probably all of us, if you exclude the few of independent means – are dealing with. There seems to be a market for alternative media. But because of the way the Internet works, people expect it to be produced and available kind of like manna from the sky. In the pre-Internet days, people generally had to pay for newspapers and magazines – if they wanted to read the material, anyhow. Otherwise, you had to wait for someone who had paid for a paper to throw it away; or filch a magazine from the doctor’s office… and so on.
But now? It’s freeeeeeeee!
And, it’s a double whammy. Advertisers – the majority – have joined the bandwagon, with Goo-guhl leading the train. They expect publishers to give them free advertising. To put up their ads, to publicize their products, but only pay when a specific individual specifically makes a purchase by clicking on the ad. That they are able to get away with this rape is astounding.
To get a handle on the extreme violence of this double penetration, consider:
Ford does not pay for a 30 second spot during halftime Superbowl Sunday. They only pay when a person shows up at a Ford dealer and specifically says, “I am here to buy a new F-150 because I saw the ad last weekend.” This is the way Goo-guhl advertising works online.
Filthy weasels!