how I spent my time awol

And another ten days passes with only crickets heard from.

Where does the time go? Oh yeah, Desperate Housewives. The first season finally came to blockbuster and I managed to devour it in large chunks over the past 10 days. Very tasty indeed, much more than I'd anticipated. After the ancient agonies of Emma Bovary and Anna Karenina, the twisted maneuvrings of Gabrielle Solis are some weird kind of bliss. But why do we not see her even considering abortion? Is it too much for network tv? Now I have to wait a few months till season two arrives.

And although I've spent many hours at work just cleaning out / filing some of the over-400 [non-personal, of course] emails that have accumulated in my webmail, I didn't manage to use any of that ill-gotten time to post here. At the end of the week, when I finally got the urge, I also got a pile of less-ignorable work to do. Yes, I know, "we can do better."

I also spent a couple of days' worth of free time figuring out (with the help of my technophiliac 13-yr-old) how my new iPod Nano works. I wasn't very excited when I got it, I must admit, but I am totally psyched about it now. What an awesome little machine! And by 'little' I mean smaller than a credit card (but about as thick as 3 credit cards, which is still pretty slim, my friends). We are talking miniature -- about a quarter of the size of the kid's "mini iPod". Is she jealous? Oh yeah. Even though at barely 2Gb it's got only half the memory of hers.

What a cool concept this is: Connect the iPod to a USB port. This launches the "iTunes" software interface. When iTunes is open on your screen, you insert a cd you want to "rip" (new jargon for the benefit of previous generations, which here means copy to your computer so that it can be quickly transferred to your iPod). iTunes goes right to work ripping, and you can go back to reading your mail, or whatever. In my case, this is a slow process -- maybe I need a hi-speed USB port, which may be worth looking into -- but it goes on in the background. Once the music is copied into the computer, it appears in the iTunes list, and all I have to do is drag it into the "squarepeg's iPod" folder. Then I click on "update" and iTunes proceeds to synchronize what appears in its folders with what I've got on my teeny tiny sound machine.

Of course the ridiculously small hardware belies the iPod's incredibly big sound. It comes with a pair of teeny tiny earphones, along with teeny tiny black foam rubber ear pads that require the dexterity of barbie-doll sized fingers to put in place. The whole concept, in fact, is reminiscent of an intricate doll's house where you would have a fully-equipped livingroom set up with a fully-functioning home cinema inlcuding surround sound. It just all looks too small to be possible.

But I guess this is just the beginning of the wonders of the evolving nano world.