Gadgetphillia
I love gadgets. I really try to be practical about the gadgets I buy, but this is a subjective statement. My ideas about practical may differ greatly from the vast majority of you out there. Somehow I manage to save enough money to pay for a year of college, but just barely. The portion of my paychecks that are not spent on Mountain Dew and snacks is left over for gadgets. I have managed to restrain my self to some degree here at college, where the paychecks are always smaller and need to go more places.
I am very appreciative of my early experience with pocket knives, and leatherman tools. Yet my first really electronic gadget in the modern sense was an mp3 player. I decided that I needed a Rio 500. Whenever it was that I bought it it was available in a bulk price of like $140. Seemed like a great deal for a 64MB flash player.
I loved that little thing, it was so solid and compact. It had a slot for Smart Media cards. That particular media was really nice because it was so thin and small. I took that player all over with me for a year, and popped ear buds in whenever some particular teacher was getting really boring. I eventually wore the thing out and it just sorta quit working. To even get it to turn on I had to jiggle the battery just right. It was really done for when it would no longer let me transfer songs to it. Everytime I plugged the USB cable in the thing turned itself off.
I really miss that thing and have considered going to find one just like it to see if I can get one for a lot cheaper. If I decided to get an MP3 player I would probably want a harddrive based one like the Creative Zen. You see, I have already had my iPAQ 3635 for a year and a half now and am very very happy with it. I laid down top dollar for it and wasnt going to pay for a seperate player when the iPAQ would do jsut as well with a CF card in it. Now the iPAQ is frustrating me, when playing mp3�s it tends to run the batteries completely dead without telling me. This is bad, that means I lose everything since the last time I had backed it up. The iPAQ is a Jack of all Trades, but certainly not a master of music playing. I doubt I will actually buy anything soon, my bills and expenses are starting to add up. I have little to spare for the next few years.
My advice for the day is: �When in doubt, use your fire breathing war elephants.�
Posted by
sirtimbly on 02/26/2003 at 04:02 AM
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Beefalicious
Do you know what I think tastes really good? Any guess? Well, I�ll just have to tell you then. Steak. Saturday I ate about 1 and a half pounds of wholesome Nebraska steak.
Allow me to lapse into [narrative mode].
We were huddled together around the glowing coals of a grill trying to ignore the biting cold and the wind that howled through the trees. All of us were intent on our objective; no creation of God or man would come between our steaks and us. Eighty pounds of juicy Omaha sirloin tip were sitting in a large bucket of marinade. The aroma of the spices and Worcestershire sauce inundated our senses, blocking out much of the world around us. The paltry heat from the charcoal was just enough to make steam rise from the wet slabs of meat as light snow flakes landed on man, meat, and metal. The intoxicating aroma was enough to drive a man crazy, and the flickering coals were dying out as the night progressed.
The heat of the coals had begun to wane after only one small group of steaks was cooked. To rectify this situation we made use of the majority of a bottle of lighter fluid. Most of us retained our eyebrows, and enjoyed both the flash of heat and the excitement in a man’s heart that accompanies such a large burst of flame. After dumping another pile of fresh charcoal on the short lived blaze we placed a fresh batch of bovine flesh on the fire, and gave the charred and chemical scented steaks to the few men who were foolish enough to be away when we revitalized the fire.
When at last the prime choices of meat began coming off the grill we all experienced a profound joy in their consumption. The steak went from the grill to our hands, and then directly between our gaping jaws. The pink juices that leaked out of the meat ran over our hands and down our chins. These rivulets of tangy marinade and the various bodily juices that had remained in our dear departed mooing friend were largely unsuccessful in escaping us. Each man licked his fingers clean and grinned, waiting for more steak to finish cooking,
This continued for several timeless hours of shivering and bonding. Perhaps we felt a primal connection with our ancestors and all the many years they had spent eating partially cooked flesh of a wild creature over a fire in the cold and the dark. Though we were separated from our ancestors by centuries of technological improvement and development, that brotherhood of men was able to forget the worries of the modern world, if only for a few hours until we had filled our bellies.
[/narrative mode]
Well, that was fun wasn’t it? That is a very romantic image. Surely I have conveyed the essence of masculine emotion. I think I should get back into a writing class or something next semester. I don’t seem to have enough outlets for this overflowing font of creativity. Perhaps I feel compelled to be this wordy because I am so proud of the websites fairly refined Content Management system. Anything less than flowery speech would not do my journal true justice.
Posted by
sirtimbly on 02/25/2003 at 12:02 AM
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Correlation
Though you may not perceive it, the English language is it�s own universe. The system of words and phrases with which we communicate is truly massive. The literary tools with which we can explore our lexicon have expanded greatly over the past several centuries. A simple thesaurus or a dictionary are often the most valuable instrument a writer can possess. Being an amateur social commenter and diarist, I myself greatly appreciate the complexity of phrase structures, despite my apparent lack of grammatical finesse. The Visual Thesaurus offers a truly innovative view of the universe of the English Language. My aptitude for spatial perception is complimented with this progressive representation of how words interact and define themselves.
The presence of such an amazing tool is all the justification that is necessary for the very existence of technology.
Examples of my verbal prowess can be found throughout my ranting on this site, though I have yet to make my oldest entries on this site available through the new database system. Perhaps I will some day be happy with my website in that fanciful place of possibilities called the future. Hope for that eventuality has forsaken my heart.
Posted by
sirtimbly on 02/20/2003 at 04:02 PM
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