Standing On Boxes

It appears Best Buy does have the iPod-nano (It still wasn’t on their website today – or on display). You just have to ask for them. Two colors… black and white… two storage sizes 2GB and 4GB. I now have a 2GB white one… Plenty of room for my tastes… and the colored skins for the thing look like they would work better with a white one… which I think might be a necessity… it collects fingerprints just as easily as the PSP… but doesn’t come with something to clean it…

I’m stuffing it full of music right now… the stuff that I had on my shuffle (mostly) and a bit more . (Total ? 296 songs/ 19 hours of music. With room left over. Mostly full albums… Beatles, Marillion, Pink Floyd, Rush, Heart, and a bunch of others from my current play-list.. Sheryl Crow, Michelle Branch, Anna Nalick, Alanis Morissette, Johnny Cash… etc. What? No Led Zeppelin? Couldn’t decide which one… maybe next time…)

It has a random/shuffle feature just like the shuffle. Which isn’t actually a feature I use a lot.

My iBook has a slow USB port… so I use my thinkpad to put music on the ipods… it has the faster USB 2.0. And neither of them does firewire…

So… what happens to the Shuffle? I don’t need two ipods… I already have plans for it . If a certain T still wants it…

But my iBook is almost back where it started… without the Airport update… just need to do a few cleanup things… like getting rid of the ton of other languages that get installed even when you tell the install to not do that. But such is life with a low end iBook… every MB is precious.

Shall we count the ways?

1. New ‘version’ of “Radio” (8.2), the “Frontier” based tool I use for my blog and for keeping track of all of my fics… changed the upload frequency of different things… and not in a good way IMHO. Now when I update something more than a month old… I have to force it to upload it to the blog host.

   I need to find out where tht is controlled from (it certainly isn’t in one of the config menus) and fix that.

2. A bunch of Apple updates…
   • iTunes 5.x/Quicktime 7.02 – to support the new Ipod – mostly. And give iTunes a semi-new look.
   • Safari update (actually – this is a couple days old)
   • Airport update 4.2

   Guess which one broke my iBook? The Airport update “fixed” a security issue for people with machines running the original Airport card (Like my iBook) that doesn’t support WPA (Like my iBook and my Sharp Zaurus’ wi-fi card). Something to do with a random WEP key… well… on MY iBook… the Airport card still works… it still sees the wi-fi networks in the building… but it can’t connect to my wireless hub any more…

   This is the first real problem I’ve had with an Apple update in years…

   And, of course, the only way to fix this is to reinstall Mac OS X (Or upgrade to 10.4… but I don’t have a DVD drive so I can’t do that yet anyway… that’s on my January – need a new iBook with a new OS and DVD drive list ))… crap!!!!

   This is assuming I can upgrade/restore and skip that Aiport update…

   Or maybe the other wireless hub I have sitting around would work?

   Gues what I’ll be doing Saturday?

I really didn’t expect the local Best Buy to have the new iPod-nano on the same day it was announced (though you can already order it from the Apple Store)… but I would have bought one after work today if they had. It’s the Ipod format I want… much smaller than the mini it replaces (though with 2GB less storage – it is solid state unlike the hard drive based mini)… more room for music than the shuffle… and a color lcd screen.

It was going to be my “impulse buy” of the month…

They didn’t even know about it… they still have the mini’s out on display… and their website doesn’t mention them yet… weird.

Anyone whose been watching might have noticed that my little fic “The Bandersnatch” has been growing slowly over the past week… I think I’ve hit a blocking point in it… the scene with Buffy/Luna near the end… One of those :

Do I write it like This or like That… subtext or not? It won’t even remotely approach something like a PWP fic… but how far do I head in that direction. A conundrum. None of my fics have gone beyond subtext yet…

I haven’t decided yet…

Yes, gas prices at the pump are starting to go down… $2.99/gal for regular yesterday… a combination of more pipeline/refinery capacity recovery and the end of the summer driving season…

And elsewhere…

The White House is in heavy spin territory… trying to blame everyone but themselves for the New Orleans disaster… even when the actual facts are contrary to what they are saying…

But the people BushCo. are trying to blame are Democrats… so that’s okay… who cares about those poor non-Bush voters in Louisiana. Fewer Democrats can only be a good thing…

And who are the American people going to believe? We do remember the last election? Don’t we?

Okay… enough cynicism for the day… I need to go get ready for work…

Just for fun… I signed up with Technorati.. not that anyone ever links to my blog out here in the back waters of blog-dom. So don’t ever expect that link to show anything useful.

Most of the fan fic types I know use/do LiveJournal, or web forums, not blogs.

Maybe…

I’ve started sorting my books by author… took me long enough since I last moved… but do I go that extra step? Do I take one of those bibliographic programs and create an actual catalog of them?

There’s at least one… where all you enter is the ISBN and it goes and looks it up on Amazon.com. Not sure what Amazon uses that info for… but it must be something for their marketing department… tracking the kinds of books used/read/owned by people in a particular area.

I was really just looking for something to read… not in the mood to write, not in the mood for some Bond/Ian Fleming (though some of them are about the only fiction in my possession I haven’t read recently (last 20 years).

The price per barrel of oil? Down for the first time in days… we’re drowning in the stuff…

The price of gas at the pump? Up another 15 cents/gallon. Right before a long weekend… still a distribution/refinery/scarcity problem here in the South.

It’s gonna hurt next week when I actually need to put gas in the buggy… it’ll be $4/gal by then… or maybe not… if I topped it off now and the $/gallon went down… I’d be bummed… it’s a gamble.

A historian at the end of his show about George Orwell and Winston Churchill. On “History-International”

6PM- Zipcode 37912 – Premium: $3.49/gal. ($3.45/gal out on I-40 at the Exxon around exit 379) (Corrected)

What more can I say? Up another 20 cents… the pipelines are up now but it’s going to take weeks to catch up… and that assumes they are at full capacity by next Tuesday…

And the Sams Club gas station next to the Wal-mart I frequent? Had lines for gas…

People are filling up before the long weekend… wouldn’t it be better to just stay home this weekend?

And New Orleans? Getting worse… the federal government is moving at a glacial pace… and more people die every day…

Going home from work today? Seemed kind of surrealistic… a beautiful day… and Rachel ray is doing her cute/perky thing (in UT orange no less) on FoodTV. And 600 miles away in New Orleans… a small chunk of Noah-like apocalypse.