There are those who call me a tightwad. A skinflint. The Man with the
Padlocked Wallet. Scrooge McScrooge. And I call these people my family
and friends. They are right. I would rather not go into hock buying
things I don't need or overpaying for things I do need. And with an
ever-wary eye on the price tag, I've been out accumulating things for
less lately. But like a true believer, I don't just buy tat at knockdown
prices. I examine my purchases carefully over the medium to long
haul...then decide if I made the right choice.
What follows are a few of my tech bargains...along with an honest
assessment of whether I paid too much attention to the price, and not to
the goods.
Narrow-budget Wi-Fi
Like everyone on the planet in 2005, I'm on the wireless wagon. I tap
into 802.11b and g networks free at my workplace and at Panera cafes
across the States (yes, you read that right...Panera cafes provide free
wireless network access...and some great soup-and-sandwich
combinations). I've even been known to pay for $10 day passes at
T-Mobile hotspots in Borders Books and Music and Starbucks, though the
price of the caffienated syrup drinks and the cooler-than-thou clientele
at Starbucks do put me off a bit.
But there's one thing about workplace Wi-Fi that bugs me, it's the
range. Try as I might to get coverage, I find that I turn a corner with
my signal-monitoring notebook and I go from 4Mbps to zero in two steps.
While waiting for the 802.11n standard to be ratified next year (wait a
few months for a price break), I need to boost the range and strength of
my Wi-Fi signals.
So did I go for Belkin Wireless Pre-N router, a $149 802.11n-ready
router? Did I go for the Buffalo WRB-G54K router-and-repeater kit, a
snap at $110? Did I plug an $89 Hawking HSB1 signal booster into the
antenna extension of my Wireless G base station? No...of course not. I
spent twenty-some bucks on a seven-inch solid metal mountable antenna
from a company I never heard of.
Was I happy with my purchase? Strangely enough, I was, but not enough to
name the brand of the device I tried. I actually tried three external
antennae, two omnidirectional ones that boost the signal in all
directions, and one unidirectional one that spreads a stronger signal in
a pizza-slice formation of about thirty degrees. They all worked the
same way--you unscrew the antenna from a dual-antenna base station and
screw in the signal booster. In each case, I got somewhat stronger
signals with a somewhat larger range. But the round-the-corner cold
spots remained a problem that only a router-and-repeater combo could
solve.
Was this a wise investment? Probably not. Next time I'll quadruple my
budget and get a Buffalo WRB-G54K. Or wait to see if 802.11n signals
solve the problem.
Free domains...sort of
To get a .com or .net after your name, you need to spend somewhere
between eight and thirty dollars every year, depending on the domain
registrar you pick. (To price-compare, scope out the price tables at
regselect.com). To get e-mail and a Web site at that domain, you could
be staring at anywhere between $35 a year to $100 a month, depending on
how demanding you want to be. That is, unless you want to go on over to
OneSite.com and score a domain with hosting for your Web site and one
e-mail address with Web mail reader...for nothing. This service of
domain registrar Catalog.com comes with a full complement of Web hosting
options, including a template-driven web site builder, a blogger, and
when you sign in at your own domain, a customizable portal page with
news, online calendar and scheduler, and other My.Yahoo-style features.
There's a little advertising, including a can't-shake-it promotional sig
at the bottom of all your outgoing e-mails, but it's nothing too nasty
at this point.
Now, this is all free for the first year, or for up to five years if you
register as a student at a .edu e-mail address. After that, you will get
charged at Catalog.com's full $35 rate. But even that's pretty
reasonable for a full-on domain registration and hosting package.
So how does OneSite rank on the Tightwad happiness scale? I'll give it a
solid 8 or 9. It would be nice to have it all for nothing for ever...but
even I realize you can't expect that.
Free cards...sort of
So now that I've got a new domain and a custom e-mail address courtesy
of OneSite, the first thing I want to do is publicize it. What better
way than to print up some business cards? I could stroll down to a local
print shop or Staples, but ... what's this? More free stuff online.
VistaPrint.com has been providing free business cards in full color for
years now, and they also do postcards, fridge magnets, and other
stationery with your name on it. Now, like all free stuff, it's not
actually free, but it's not far off.
VistaPrint provides high-quality card stock, sharp text and vivid color
printing, and some colorful templates. But you do have to pay postage on
them, so 250 cards will set you back about ten bucks. And there is an ad
for VistaPrint on the back, which is the first place I go on any
business card to write details about my meeting with the card donor. The
freebies are, therefore, not high on the Tightwad value scale. However,
you can pay a bit extra to take off the VistaPrint mention (and upload
your own logo or picture) with a Premium Business Card. This runs at
about twenty dollars per 250 cards, plus postage.
VistaPrint premium business cards are nudging the ceiling of what I'd
call a bargain, but I've been very happy to hand out a
make-it-in-five-minutes personalized color business card. And in the
end, the idea is only to be a tightwad, but not look like one.
