When my in-laws moved from their house to a condo, we had to move my wife’s Harley that had been stored in their garage. We now owned our own condo that has secure underground parking, and one of our two spots was empty, so luckily we had somewhere to move it. Karin’s vestibulopathy has kept her from riding it for the last seven years, but the last time she did her insurance costs were about what a car costs us now. While we had not had storage insurance on it for the past few years, we knew we had better get some now that it was a bit more publicly accessible. Given that we pay just over $1000 for our car’s insurance, we expected storage insurance to be about $150.

We visited the insurance office at our credit union, and sat down with an insurance agent.

Agent: Storage insurance will cost you $604 a year.

Us: Ahhhh…….

Me - thinking logically: Well, we’re going to try and sell it, and so having it ready for test drives would be a good thing. It can’t be much more for road insurance. What would that cost us?

Agent: Well, as you have your full safe driving discount, it will only be $2300.

Us: Ahhhh…….

Me: OK, we’ll just be getting storage insurance in that case.

Agent: Of course. Now will you be wanting comprehensive on that? It’s $300 more.

Me: To cover what? Comprehensive is extra insurance for crashes. Storage insurance covers all damage that might occur while it’s sitting in my parking spot. I’m pretty sure that if we have comprehensive and crash into something, the insurance will be null and void since it isn’t insured for driving.

Agent: Oh, comprehensive on a storage policy would be to cover you if it were to roll out of your parking spot, across the lane, and into the vehicle parked opposite you.

Me: It’s a bike. If it starts to roll, it will fall over.

This weekend has been a busy one as I work on several computers, wiping them all and then setting them up fresh; but I do have time to get online as I sit waiting for various installations to finish.

I had posted previously that the website Technorati would not index this blog. Technorati is a site that keeps track of every known blog, and allows you to create a list of those blogs you follow so that you can read them all in one place. It also ranks blogs based on links from other blogs, frequency of posting, popularity, and other criteria I don’t know. Therefore, adding a blog I visit often to my favorites there lets the author(s) know I appreciate their work.

One of the main reasons for my previous postings is that I found when searching that a lot of people reported problems with Technorati indexing their blog; but not many ever said what was the solution. I therefore promised that I would follow up with my posting, just in case someone came here as a result of searching when they had issues.

I’m happy to report that my issues with Technorati are fixed. Sadly, I cannot say how they became fixed. I had emailed Technorati support, who promised to get back to me and even stated that if I hadn’t heard from them within a week, I could then request an update as to when they would be able to get to me. Reading the experiences of others indicated that often support had fixed the issue, but that sometimes it took weeks of reminders before support looked at their issue. I had decided to give it about 10 days before I bothered them again, and right about then the issue suddenly resolved itself. I had made no changes on my end that should have helped, and since Technorati never got a hold of me, I have no idea if they did something that resolved the issue on their end.

However, I have since noticed poor performance on their part in other areas. My wife’s blog will sometimes be listed in Technorati as not having been updated in five or six days, even though she has made at least two posts a day. This will be despite the fact that we can see the Technorati spiders visiting her blog’s feed multiple times a day. According to Technorati, my sister-in-law’s blog did not even exist until I manually pinged it today, after which it immediately said not only that the blog existed, but that it had already noticed when looking at three other blogs that they linked to it. I would think that a site that tries to index all blogs would notice one on Blogger, and especially notice it if it was linked to in other blogs it has indexed. Similarly, my stepson’s blog existed in their index, but Technorati had not noticed any updates in it for 77 days until I manually pinged it today.

So it appears that perhaps Technorati is suffering pains from the ambitious task they have tried to undertake. It is a good thing that I am not too concerned with my ranking there, or these would really get to me.