The alternative to flowers!

Wednesday, September 13, 2006

New toy coming

I did something yesterday I haven’t done in a very long time: I bought a new Apple product on the day it was announced. I finally broke down and ordered a new iPod. I think the last time I did that was April, 1994, when I bought a new Power Mac 7100 the day they came out. My old second-generation 20 Gigabyte iPod (a model which has the distinction of being physically the largest, heaviest iPod ever) has been feeling its age. I’m totally out of space on it. The battery doesn’t last very long any more. I’ve been coveting one of the newer models for at least a year now, but held off because of finances and the idea that what was on offer at the time was not enough of a jump over my 20 GB. I almost jumped a couple of weeks ago when the 60 GB iPod video dropped to $365 at Amazon. But I felt there was something new just around the corner, so I held my fire. The 80 GB isn’t that much of an advance over the 60 GB it replaces. The big difference is an extra 20 GB of space and a brighter screen (useful for me given how much music I have on my computer right now), useful for video, but I don’t figure to use it for video very much. But the other difference was a $50 price drop, and between the improvements in space and screen and that price drop, I figured it was time.

Apple says I should have it by next Tuesday. I’ve got about 40 GB of music. That gives me a few days to rip away....

(I checked before buying, and Apple wasn’t offering that offensive ABC program about 9/11 through the iTunes Music Store, so I felt free to buy. I hope they don’t add it in the future; I would hate to make my next computer run Ubuntu Linux or something. I’m going to miss all that college football on ABC and ESPN. Guess I’ll have to become a Notre Dame (NBC) or Southeastern Conference (CBS) fan, or listen to my Big Ten games on XM....)

Posted at 4:51 PM
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Saturday, September 2, 2006

Powerless

One nice thing about having the computer and cable modem on a UPS is that I can post something to my blog about how it’s nice to be able to post something to my blog when the power is out because Tropical Depression Ernesto has come to visit. And then I crawl up my navel and disappear.

Bleah. This is the fourth or fifth time the power has gone out in the past 18 hours. I’ll have to see if I can get the satellite radio to work on batteries so I can at least listen to the Penn State-Akron game that starts in a couple of minutes, because it doesn’t look like I’ll be seeing it on TV....

Posted at 3:29 PM
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