Smart phones do have a second life

When I lost my beloved iPhone 4 I was devastated, I replaced it with a new look alike iPhone 4s.

Fast forward 2 years later, the phone started showing its age. First evidence was the lack of voice in FaceTime and then came the day I realized I couldn't plug my earphones to the phone. The last straw was when the power button on the phone broke, imagine not able to lock or power down your phone, it was a night mare for few days.

All the above and the imminent launch of iPhone 6, I had almost made up my mind to wait for the launch and buy the new iPhone. But the new phone looked more Androidsh and to top it off my service provider threatened to hike price if renewed.

All said and done, to get a new phone I would have to pay $400 extra plus the equipment cost over period of 2 years and $180 year on year from there.

That pushed me to look into nexus 5, but after owning nexus 7 I am not a fan of bare bone Android any more.

So, I looked at the last option of repair and resurrect my existing phone, a quick Google search led me to icracked.com, a few phone calls and a day later, all my iPhone problems were fixed and it is working like a champ. The total cost was $65 including the cost of a new battery. Thankfully only 1 part broken and rest of it was just cleaning and removing lint.

How long does it take to sell a Toyota Camry?

How long does it take to sell a Toyota Camry? How does 10hrs sound? Surprised, it's true. When we decided to offload our 2001 Camry and posted the ad on craigslist Austin Friday night around 11:30pm, by 12:15am I started getting text messages and emails inquiring about the car. Initially I thought it was a spam and ignored the same (like the chat messages that popup automatically when you enter a chat room). By Saturday morning 8:00 there were 5 text messages including 1 offer to buy the car outright without even trying the car. I started responding to the texts 1 by one in the order it was received, by 9:00AM I had 1 guy was scheduled to come at 10:30 and other at 11:30 and another 12:30.

While the guy at 10:30 did not confirm back, a lady called and asked if she could come and take a look at the car. I was hesitant as there were others who had inquired before her but she was persistent and I decided to give her the 10:30 slot. It appears she was in a big rush and she showed up at 10:00 itself. She and her husband looked at the car inside, outside, under the hood and inside the boot, did a test drive and said they want to buy. They asked for slightly lower than I was asking and when I declined to negotiate, they agreed for the whole price, paid in cash and signed all the required paperwork and we were done by 11:00am.

I must say, a few things worked to my advantage, considering it was my wife's car it was almost dent free barring a few scratches at few places and well kept both inside and out, another thing was that the car was mostly dealer serviced and hence every single detail of the service was posted on Carfax and it made my selling easy.

I am not vouching for service at the dealership all the time, I do have some bad experiences with my VW dealership.

Not so smart Google maps

I have come to rely on  Google maps for everything related to  travel, so much so that I no longer carry my stand alone trusted Garmin gps with me. It works fairly well in most cases but did utterly bad in one case. The recent example was when Google maps was showing my destination to be in the middle of an elevated freeway, while my actual destination was on the access road of the freeway.

Made me think about the addressing schemes, if the address is something like xxx on yyy freeway, then can I really blame Google for asking me find my destination on an elevated freeway. Another possibility is that the address of the destination existed and the freeways had a make over and became elevated to add more roads underneath. At which point, may be the address ought to have been updated to reflect the change in road schemes but didn’t for some reason, Again benefit of doubt Google. But considering Google is smart and it’s applications like Google maps are one of the best it should realize the destination can't be on an elevated freeway. Yes, I tried both Android and an iOS device with the same result.

All the above being true, the irony was, the blue icon for destination was showing the right location (on the access road) using which I used to reach my destination by manual navigation but the automated routing was telling me to jump off the freeway.

I think its the case of not so smart Google for once :).