Free t-shirt drawing winner and other thoughts

Happy July!  Our free t-shirt drawing winner is Josh Henderson of Weaver, Alabama.  Congratulations!  Be sure you are registered as a member on the Dadsworld main page for your automatic entry into our monthly drawings.

This being the 4th of July weekend, we are busy with family and will wait until next week to unveil some of our exciting changes, including a new Dad of the Month interview, and other content changes to the site. 

I wanted to take a moment to talk about technology and frustration.  In the past couple of weeks we have had several pieces of equipment fail.  There is never a good time for these things to happen, but in this tight economy, it’s even more aggrivating.

 A Toshiba Regza 32″ flat screen television that is 2 years and 1 month old (the warranty lasted 1 year and we bought an extra year from Costco) quit working.  It wasn’t used that much, but suddenly became pixelated and unviewable.  The repair company wants $95 just to come out and tell us how much it will cost to repair.  Nice.

 Then our JVC Everio docking station for our JVC hard disc drive camcorder failed (not long after the warranty expired as well), so we can’t burn discs until we get a new one ($200), or go through the computer. 

We had tremendous internet problems with Qwest, so we switched back to Comcast who we’ve used for years.  They didn’t even try to get me on the 2 year  committment that I signed, because they knew the service didn’t work.  It was down 14 days of the 4 months I had the service, and the speed was miserable. 

Our baby monitor, that has 2 cameras so we can keep an eye on both of our children went out.  It’s the second one that we’ve gone through.  The quality of baby monitors is absolutely unacceptable. 

Our barbeque had 3 of the 4 burners rust through recently, so I had to replace them as well.  We barbeque a lot, so I guess that’s to be expected.  I know that’s not an electronic device, but still frustrating.

 The lens (15-85mm) on our Canon 20D decided to quit working, during a camping trip to the beach, a $124 repair and just 2 days ago the air-conditioning coil went out (when it was 90 degrees out) in my 2008 Ford F-250 truck.  Luckily, it was still covered by the warranty, the only thing that was!

Talk about a wave of recent technological frustration!  I know that computers and electronic gadgets are a big part of most of our lives these days, but sometimes I wish they weren’t.

More on technology in a coming post.

Be sure to spend time with your loved ones this weekend and have a great 4th of July celebration.  Be safe as well.  www.dadsworld.com