"Jeffrey S. Sharp" wrote:
>
> On Tue, 20 Nov 2001, James L. Rice wrote:
>
> > my friend moved to a small town in Oklahoma,
>
> Unless he just really values the "don't use a turn signal 'cuz everyone
> knows where I'm goin'" small-town society, please send your friend my
> condolences. I've been there but managed to escape with (hopefully) more
> of my life ahead than behind. :-)
>
> On the other hand, the cost of living in small-town Oklahoma is one of the
> cheapest in the USA. For a concrete example, in my old hometown, a nice
> 3750 ft^2 house with a huge property sold for US$70K. This means less
> money spent living, more money to spend on classiccmping, and greater ease
> in finding room to put all of it.
My wife an I have gotten pretty good at catalog shopping, so mail order
works well for us. I'm finding that most of the local stores (even the
malls) are selling lower quality items. Though I will say that Kmart has
made a vast improvement since Martha Stewart got involved. The only thing
we can't do mail order is food. I live in NJ and find that the area's
restaurants stay open until ~midnight and we have a varied menu to
choose from. I understand that Brooklyn has a more varied menu too.
On the other note of piece meal components, I've found that with a lot of
imagination one can take advantage of today's uControllers to build some
of the coolest stuff. Processors cost ~$6, 3 pcbs (~2"x3") $50, add the
components and a single hand built board can cost <$100. PLD's, FPGA, etc.
etc.. Man do we live in interesting times (both good and bad).
--
Linux Home Automation Neil Cherry ncherry_at_home.net
http://members.home.net/ncherry (Text only)
http://linuxha.sourceforge.net/ (SourceForge)
http://hcs.sourceforge.net/ (HCS II)
Received on Tue Nov 20 2001 - 09:52:02 GMT