Stuff

MP3 players:
I figured I'd look through old MP3 players before buying a new one; I have several sitting around.

• The 1G Sandisk is still dead. It might live again if I decide it's worth opening up and cleaning in distilled water or something, but it's probably not worth it.
  
• I have an old 512M Sandisk around somewhere, that would work though it's harder on batteries. 512M doesn't hold some audiobooks, and it certainly doesn't hold a book plus a week's NPR podcasts, so that's a drawback, but it'd work.
  
• I found the old Memorex player, the thing is ancient. The display whacked out after I updated the firmware one time. Google tells me that happened to a lot of people. I was about to use it anyway then realized it only has 64M internal and only takes up to a 256M SD card - useless.
  
• Finally, I dug up L's old 1GB Samsung player, charged it up, and started using that. It's pretty nice. I just need to remember to put it away or slip something waterproof over it when it's raining.
  

I got a fair chunk of tilling done on the garden and the border for the front flower bed last night. Still need to do some weeding, and the new bed on the east side is not great; I used old seed and lots of stuff didn't come up. There are tons of weeds.

Yeah, you wish...

We'll be in the UP next week. There was some concern because I won't have a working phone while up there. So they said they'd give me a LOANER phone for the week. I was expecting, well, you know, a PHONE.

Today they dropped off this ridiculous thing:

Blackberry Curve 8310

And, when I said "OK, I'll get it back to you on the 28th or maybe the week before if I stop by, the guy who dropped it off said "Actually they were talking about letting you keep it."

I know what they're trying to do. They're all chanting "JOIN US" because they're all attached at the hip to their little crack pipes; they are always pulling them out at meetings every time they get an email, etc. They tried to force one of these damn things on me a couple of years ago.

If it were a PHONE I'd think about it. This isn't a phone, this is a leash. I know people say that about phones, but I don't mind phones. This thing is integrated to my outlook mail, contacts, tasks, and everything. They're not being transparent about it at all. This thing screams "we own your life."

If they think I'm going to check my email while I'm on vacation, they're out of their minds, unless they're going to pay me for it, and I'm going to bill in 30 minute increments. Glance at it for 5 seconds to check mails, 30 minutes.

I've already shut off all ringing and vibrating for anything but phone calls.

If they want me to keep it, my long-term attitude towards it will depend on if it actually works at our house. There's hardly any signal there for any company. I haven't tried AT&T for several years though. If it works, well, I'm sure I can disconnect it completely from all data services and geld it to where it's just a voice phone.

I'd keep it as-is if it came with some sort of benefit. I'd consider it, for instance, if it meant I was allowed to work at home full-time. yeah, right.

One other thing; this thing makes my CRT monitor dance like crazy when it's doing data communications, even from 18 inches away. Yikes.

Keeping the computer busy

My kids are up-to-the-minute on Dr Who. I, OTOH, haven't had time to sit down and watch an episode for a long time. In fact, I haven't watched Runaway Bride yet. That puts me a full two seasons behind now. Not to mention Torchwood or Sarah Jane Adventures. The latter are already on the player, the former I'll leave for another time; I can honestly take or leave Torchwood.

I went to load them up on my MP3 player to watch in the car on the trip, and remembered that I'd downloaded an excellent set of fan-produced DVDs last year instead of XviDs as I normally do. So now I'll be queuing up a whole lot of DVD->XviD encoding over the next few days. Luckily I have two DVD drives and AutoGordianKnot.

I also have a few dozen ebooks in the reader.

Now all I have to do is actually get ready for the actual events...