Received a letter from the Home Association stating, “… the Board of Directors authorized the rentention of legal counsel to receive advice in request for a special meeting…“. This all because of a meeting which was going to look into the possible need of replacing the current Board of Directors and to see how (un-)wisely our money was and is being spent. The meeting which was to be held in 2 days got “cancelled by the Board” and the new date was set to be in almost a month… enough time to really make sure there is a lot of time to for spending a lot of money on the “legal counsel”.

I really, really do not care about all the nitpicking and small games going on in our neighborhood and Home Association, what miffs me though is the fact that I am quite certain who the “carriers of the cost for the legal counsel” will be – us, the members of this Home Association.

On top of money spent for quarrels that same money is not being spent where it should  be spent and one of the reasons this special meeting was to be called in the first place: finally improving the lake dam and dredging the lake to again come up to code which has been demanded by the city to be done over 5 years ago. This is where our money should currently go as this could put us all into liability due to the risk of our small sub-division community lake dam to break under heavy waters.

Isn’t it great to live in the subs.

The long version is a day of computer hardware support, fixing, backing up, moving old to new, chasing down software only to find that the backed up disk image of Alias Sketchbook could not be mounted and the .zip of it had long time ago been trashed, but finding after a lot of back and forth the solution for this, but then only to find that Painter X would not install even though installed perfectly on another machine with the same OS version on it, and after 3 clean uninstalls and reinstalls and re-download of the software… given up on this for now but found solution for present time to get that what’s in my head OUT.

Exhausted?

That’s exactly how I felt after all of this.

Good news is that Alias Sketchbook is working and in combination with Photoshop can get the job done. And I am finally again able to draw on the big Cintiq 21UX and it is… delicious!

As Phil Schiller mentioned during the keynote, the iPhone 3G S will be available in 16GB and 32GB configurations. For new and “qualifying” customers, those models are available for $199 or $299 with a new two year contract, respectively. Also, the 8GB iPhone 3G will stay in the lineup, and new or qualifying users can grab one for just $99 with a two year contract. AT&T will continue to offer the 16GB iPhone 3G, while supplies last, for $149.

For current iPhone customers, however, the options are a little tricky. “Upgrade eligibility varies with each customer, but in general you will become upgrade-eligible the further you are into your service agreement,” AT&T spokesperson Seth Bloom told Ars. Typically AT&T will allow for full subsidized pricing after about 18 months. AT&T’s website wasn’t updated at the publish time, but you can check your “eligibility” online via Apple’s online ordering page. (For those of us on staff who bought an iPhone 3G on launch day last year, it looks like we won’t qualify for subsidized pricing until this December.) We have already heard expressions of severe dismay from many other iPhone 3G users being told they cannot upgrade before 2010.

If you’re not eligible for standard subsidized pricing, you can get an “early upgrade” to the iPhone 3G S for $399 for a 16GB model or $499 for a 32GB model. If you just want an iPhone 3G, you can get an early upgrade for $299. None of those options are much of a deal, but if you want an iPhone 3G S as soon as possible, that’s what it will cost you. Either way, upgrading will include a new two-year contract and an $18 upgrade fee.

Further, AT&T also says that no-commitment pricing will be available for the iPhone 3G S. That will run you $499 for an 8GB iPhone 3G, $599 for a 16GB iPhone 3G S, and $699 for a 32GB iPhone 3G S — ouch. The benefit is that you don’t have to agree to any contract for any amount of time, but an AT&T iPhone plan is required to activate any iPhone with AT&T, and those plans still start at $70 per month.

Source : 2009-06 Ars Technica

A friend does not need control or limits, he will stick around also in bad times. You CAN do business with friends. AT&T does not treat it’s iPhone customers as friends but as milking cows. Their customers are with them on the iPhone plane as there is currently no other choice (and to keep the warranty at the same time). Guess how many will be leaving the moment the door opens.

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