toys

Wow... has it really been that long?? I think I'll start being a better historian and start writing more again. There's one huge backlogged item - electronicizing my London-France-Spain-Italy journal entries. Hopefully I'll get to that at some point soon. Not right at this moment though.

Today... the arrival of some new tech toys. One of my best tech purchases has to be the Zen Stone Plus last July. Out of some random fancy, I started looking for an mp3 player, something small and not too crazy. It was in checking out the iPod shuffle that I came across the Zen Stone. More space, less cost, works like a flash drive (no need for iTunes). "Stone" not "Stone Plus" yet which I saw would be released a month later. The Stone Plus sported a small screen but otherwise, the form factor was the same as the Stone.

There were TTC lectures, audiobooks, language podcasts... well, there was music, too, but I'd say music takes up less than 10% of my listening time with it. And it was great addition to our trip last fall, especially the audio tours that I downloaded for a few of the museums.

So, after seeing me with my Stone all the time, K decided to get one. Creative updated the Stone Plus... it now has built-in speaker, which sounded exciting at first, but upon arrival, I decided I liked mine better. The width of the new model is about 1.5 to 2 times the width of mine and the speaker, while decent, just doesn't compare to the small portable ones I hook up to mine.

Tech toy #2... new My Book. When I got my 500GB last summer, 500 sounded like a lot. I was debating whether to go for the 250, but bought the 500 in the end. Thank goodness I did; I have less than 5 gigs free on it now! I suppose it doesn't help that I backed up our wolverine on it... and my D-drive. That's already 100 gigs! But what happened to the rest of that space?! Pictures, my language materials, my audio stuff... somehow. K says it sounds like whatever I get, I'll inevitably fill it up (and fairly quickly) because I just don't feel the need to burn to DVD until I'm almost out of space. My buffer. So, the new one... 1TB. But it's purely a backup drive.