{"id":134,"date":"2007-07-17T23:43:30","date_gmt":"2007-07-17T23:43:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/ubuntucat.wordpress.com\/2007\/07\/17\/living-cheaply\/"},"modified":"2007-07-17T23:43:30","modified_gmt":"2007-07-17T23:43:30","slug":"living-cheaply","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.psychocats.net\/ubuntucat\/living-cheaply\/","title":{"rendered":"Living Cheaply"},"content":{"rendered":"

I have to say I was impressed when I saw Steve Jobs demonstrate the iPhone<\/a> back in January (I didn’t see it in person, but it was impressive even on video). I’m not going to buy an iPhone, though. I’ve grown to appreciate living cheaply. <\/p>\n

I don’t want to carry around a $500 gadget on me. What if I get mugged? What if I just leave it somewhere by accident? Do I want to be tied to a Cingular plan again? Nope. <\/p>\n

I use a pay-as-you-go cheap-ass phone, an ugly $50 Sandisk player, and a beat-up wallet with little cash in it. My wife and I just donated our car (with most of the proceeeds going to our church), canceled our car insurance (which gave us a refund on the unused portion—if we’d known, we’d have donated our car weeks earlier!), and are going to get rid of our Costco membership, too (can you haul a huge bag of toilet paper out without a car?). <\/p>\n

Living cheaply is great. I used to be fascinated by new things, shiny things. Okay. I’ll admit it. I still am. But I’m learning to appreciate old stuff. I drool over the new Dell Ubuntu computers <\/a>, but I know I’m not going to be buying one any time soon. My current Dell (Inspiron 500m) from four or five years ago is still alive and kicking and runs Ubuntu perfectly “out of the box” (wireless, suspend, etc. all working without extra configuration). And, since I’m an email\/ pictures\/ music\/ web guy, I don’t really need a dual-core processor or 2 GB of RAM. <\/p>\n

Every now and then I’ll indulge myself in something new (and shiny), but I’m trying to look on the bright side of the cheap side of life, and it’s not looking too difficult to do so these days.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I have to say I was impressed when I saw Steve Jobs demonstrate the iPhone back in January (I didn’t see it in person, but it was impressive even on video). I’m not going to buy an iPhone, though. I’ve grown to appreciate living cheaply. I don’t want to carry around a $500 gadget on… Continue reading Living Cheaply<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-134","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-life","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.psychocats.net\/ubuntucat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/134","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.psychocats.net\/ubuntucat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.psychocats.net\/ubuntucat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.psychocats.net\/ubuntucat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.psychocats.net\/ubuntucat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=134"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.psychocats.net\/ubuntucat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/134\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.psychocats.net\/ubuntucat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=134"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.psychocats.net\/ubuntucat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=134"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.psychocats.net\/ubuntucat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=134"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}