Blinky Lights and Shiny Objects

Does anyone who reads this blog have any advice for me on Sergers? I'm in the market for one, but I'm having a difficult time getting good information to make a decision. There just isn't the critical mass of opinions online about this product - sewers as a group do not generally contribute as much content to online communities as computer people, or even car people. I'm getting suspicious because while there is a lot of "I wouldn't buy X because it is junk," there isn't much "I did buy X and it was junk." People seem to easily put down the brands that they did not buy, but when it comes to what they did buy, no-one is saying they screwed up. The negative reviews just aren't there, so I don't know how much I can trust the good reviews. Are the good reviewers just the lucky people who got the good machines, and the unhappy people just operate under "If you can't say something nice..."??? Or are we in a happy state ...

First, really quick, here's how the race went: Official time: 49 minutes 16 seconds Time I was moving forwards: 44 minutes 54 seconds Time from start to finish: who knows? I never did figure out where the starting line was - it wasn't where the map said it was. The announcer kept saying things like "the start is towards Balbo Street" and "the start is 300 yards north of last year's start" both not really helpful in determining the absolute location of the starting line. I ended up separated from the others from work, and fairly far back in the pack. You can see from the times above that I spent over four minutes standing still after the starting horn sounded. After we got going, I spent the whole race trying to get around the slower people who had started ahead of me. And I'm not fast. But the important thing is that I actually finished in less than 45 minutes of movement, and I probably went farther than 3.5 miles if you count all of the side t...