Theo's House o' Squee

From my current Twitter stream:

• 07:10 It's 45 and the sky is grey, and dirty snow is still piled up as far as the eye can see. However, it IS 45F so there's hope.... #
• 08:23 10 Sure-Fire Ways to Be a Complete Failure At Everything - Dumb Little Man tinyurl.com/awxdlo via @ShareThis #
• 08:25 I like that #3 and #4 are mutually incompatible. But then life is a delicate dance between sticking it out and giving up. #
• 16:48 Back from brunching, all talked out. Gonna do some design work, or at least try.... #
• 05:39 woke up early worrying about my interview today as well as what clothes to wear, should I let my references know and so on? #

In fact, the grey clouds did give way to mellow sunshine, bright blue skies and a few fluffy clouds, and 50+F. This morning, of course, it's back below freezing, but even a little break is a real mood lifter.

It also helped that I had a brunch with nice chatty people to go to, and somebody brought fresh donuts -- non-Dunkin, but definitely NE-cake style. I knitted -- I'm nearly done with a scarf that is turning out terrific and had a fine time.

While I was there, we talked a little bit about Twitter, because some people couldn't think of a purpose for it. I'm not sure what the purpose is -- for me it's somewhat like IM, but broadcast to a group -- somewhere between an IRC chat and a mini-blog. When you're confined to 140 characters, pithyness becomes a necessity.

Now that Loud Twitter republishes my tweets here, I come in and edit them -- cut out some of the ones that were just boring, replies to other twitterers that would take too much explanation, and so on, and when I feel like it expand some of the comments here. Hopefully making my daily posts something that LJers still want to read!

Later today, I have an interview with a contracting place (one with a good reputation) that may turn out to be productive -- we'll see. I am SO ready to be working again, but I'll be realistic, and only worry about details like "What happened to my dark blue interview suit, and will it fit?" and "Should I call my references to warn them them may get called soon?" and "Should I bring my references printed out or on a disk?"

If I was the kind of person who needed an excuse, I'd say it was because I've survived three. whole. weeks. of my expanded schedule, but really it was because my poor iPod Mini (iBob) finally wheezed the last few electrons out of its battery. For the past year or so, it's needed to be rebooted two or three times a day when it isn't connected to power, as the battey kept "forgetting" it had any juice.

But finally, Friday morning, it refused to come back on even when hooked up to the USB, so it was time to admit that I needed to replace it. I think I got nearly 2.5 years out of it (must check my records) so that's not shabby for a little titanium-shelled gizmo that I've dropped and kicked (accidentally) and drop-kicked even....

While I could have shopped online, there would have been the pesky waiting, so I checked the prices and determined that mostly the iPod Touch was running around $279.99 for an 8 gig, which compared favorably to the other current kinds of iPods. Yes, they're 8g and 16g, but the Mini I was moving up from only held 4g so it's not like I'm going to be more cramped....

After school, I went by MicroCenter in Cambridge which to my surprise didn't have floor models to poke at, because they had all been shoplifted and the salesguy apologized that they hadn't gotten in the shoplift-proof mounts yet. He even suggested that I go by the Apple Store in the Cambridgeside Galleria, so I said why the hell not and drove further on, getting lucky with a convenient parking space even.

Because I fed the parking meter, I made an exact note of the time that I went in, so I can report that I spent a total of 17 minutes looking at, asking questions about, and buying a new Touch.

First off, the play function is good, even though it's harder to get a visual confirmation of how far along in a podcast you are. Since I listen to a whole lot of podcasts -- NPR Science Friday, This American Life and Coffeebreak Spanish/French -- while I'm driving my car, this is important to me. But at least the screen is large enough that I can glance over and see what is playing, which I couldn't do with the tiny Mini screen.

The Touch has wifi, that is, if there's any wifi to be had. I'm not terribly impressed with the browser (tiny tiny and you have to scroll way too much) and not in love with the way you have to peck out letters with your finger -- I'd personally prefer to have a stylus. And in fact, I DO like the Palm's Graphitti script a whole lot.

On the up side, I loaded all my pictures into the Photos gallery, and they're very clear and handy. You should all be glad that I don't live near you so I could pull it out to show you pictures and pictures of my cats....

So far, the Touch isn't replacing my Palm, because it doesn't sync up the extensive contact list I have there, OR the calendar -- if the Touch calendar even synced up with my Google calendar it might help side me to changing over entirely, since I'm not going to do three calendars. Also, I have my Handy Shopper application on the Palm, which lets me keep a running tally of what I have to buy, not to mention a packing list, and that's a killer app.

I understand the iTouch is going to be opened up to developers relatively soon, so perhaps my requirements will be met sooner or later. Until then, I'm still better off than before I got it, though it's annoying to have the Palm and the iTouch almost, but not quite, doing the same thing.

I didn't get a lot accomplished yesterday, about the only thing was getting out to MicroCenter because veejane needed to drop off her ailing computer. I'm going on the MooTour with mabfan and gnomi and other good people (I think tsuki_no_bara too) so I'd already cleaned out a lot of photos out of my Palm Zire in anticipation, but you know, a project to take pictures of all the CowParade really could take up a lot of room....

So I wandered over to the Accessories department, and what to my surprise, I found an SD Cards (for extra storage) from Verbatim, which was priced at 1 gig for ~$38, which seemed pretty good -- but then I took it over to the registers and it turned out to be $28.

That's 1 gig of storage. For my PDA! I mean, geeze, my very first harddrive, for my Mac Classic (back when they were sold without harddrives!) was an incredible 20 megs! And I'm carrying it around in my purse!

Now off to the CowParade. I transfered over the remaining bunch of my pictures to the card, and I have like 990 megs left. I don't suppose I'm going to have to worry about how many pictures I can take today....