I muffed it. :-)

The items: 1 cheap-ass MP3 player, 1 silicone skin in the iPod box, and the nano in a tree-shaped box used as an ornament on the tree.

MP3 player was first, and got the expected very non-plussed reaction. She told me afterwards she was thinking "you got a life drive and you bought me this cheap piece of crap that looks like you got it free from a bank?"

Happy Hanukkah, Joyous Festivus, etc. etc. FSM needs his own birth/winter holiday. :-)

I'm trying to find origins for a phrase I have heard about 3 different, totally unrelated places recently. "How d'ya do, and how d'ya do, and how d'ya do again".

It's in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, coming out of Charlie's mouth as he's introduced.

It's in Misty Moisty Morning by Steeleye Span, but I presume that since most of what they do is traditional, it's actually a trad. song they arranged.

Check out these pedals. I never play and I want one :-)

My wife has asked for, and will receive an iPod nano for this holiday season (and here's hoping that she doesn't decide to come drifting over here any time soon; she doesn't usually read my journal....)

But if you like Squirrel Nut Zippers or tight female harmonies with askew lyrics, you need to check out The Ditty Bops. Of course if you read WWdN you already knew that.

A buddy convinced me to go see Los Straitjackets with him last night. If you haven't heard of them, they're a surf/rockabilly band that does instrumentals (mostly). Their schtick is that they wear mexican wrestler masks, and while I'm suspicious that they (band members, not masks) aren't really mexican (based on a number of observations), they address the audience in fast, Sabadoh Gigante style spanish except for song titles and people's na

Many moons ago, there were discussions in other journals about useful MP3 tools to recover from messed up files. I bookmarked the discussion at the time, but of course, the bookmark monster ate about 1/3 of my bookmarks a couple months back, including this one apparently.

I'm trying to figure out the best headphones to go with my new palm lifedrive. The ones I have lying around at home sound like crap, particularly for audio books at 160kbps. I'm sure part of it is the quality of the output circuitry itself (lots of complaints around the net), but I also want to be sure I'm at least getting the best that's possible with it.

Says it all.

So where I see this trend going is this: someone comes up with a way to wirelessly stream your iPod to a DJ who picks and chooses among the various streams available in the audience to make it happen. Then it gets built into the iPod. That would be cool, though perhaps scarily like the drum people (it was drum people, right?) in The Diamond Age by Stephenson.

Is it really true that the dot front page hasn't updated in 7 hours?

I finally get a first post, and of course I did it as an anonymous coward. Sigh.

I have a BOATLOAD of CD/DVD media with various forms of informal backups etc. etc. Probably a hundred disks or so. Much of the information between the disks is clearly redundant, different snapshots of my photos directory for one example. But not entirely, because I have on occasion deleted swaths of things I knew I had backed up (usually right after doing the backup).

(there needs to be an icon for politics in general instead of insisting on republicrats of one color or the other)

The reason the right wins with nasty tactics and the left loses with nasty tactics may be pretty simple: