Buy Nothing Day

It’s not even November, but it’s time to bust out the Buy Nothing Day hysteria and antics. This year my family is going to really tone down the whole Christmas gift thing. And I suggest you do the same. At least for a day :)

iTunes for Windows review

It’s been a few days since I downloaded iTunes for Windows, and I must say it is sweet. Not quite as polished as its Mac counterpart, but you can’t really expect it to be, since it is an amalgamation of about 50 different design styles. It really is a wonderful player, and it has the best categorization features of any other player, hands down. I haven’t bought anything from iMS yet, but its fun to browse, at least.

Downsides? Its. A. Hog. On memory, processor resources, screen redraws, everything. Granted, I have a really crappy system by most standards— 350MHz PII with 360MB RAM. But, the music skips when I click on a drop-down menu in iTunes. And that’s unacceptable. But, it has become my default music player nonetheless :)

Dreams and the moral majority

Unsurprising and not-really amazing article from the Guardian, but at least it reaffirms what we already know: that the so-called “moral majority” has leaders that are anything but.

In related news, John Ashcroft was in my dream last night. I just remember seeing him and getting really angry at him. I figure he was in it since Kate my housemate recently told me how she once lived a few doors down from Andy Ashcroft, John’s offspring.

iTunes for Windows

It looks like iTunes for Windows is finally coming out. I’ve been getting pretty excited about this recently, as it really is a top-notch player. Check this story from AppleInsider. It’s supposed to be released next Thursday (the 16th).

In other related news, I signed up for an eMusic account last week. Now, after having an account for such a short time, they’ve gone and changed the entire structure! Instead of “unlimited” (actually capped around 2000 songs/month) they’ve cut it to 65 songs/month (for the $14.95/month plan, which I have). This sucks for many reasons. The thing I like(d) about them is they use unrestricted, high quality VBR MP3s (not DRM crippled crap). However, the best feature about it was its exploration possibilities. There is a lot of music by indie artists on eMusic, and you generally have to download a lot to get stuff you really like. The upside is you learn about tons of bands (and which new ones you love) in the process. Now that I only have 65 songs/month to play with, I can’t really explore at all. I guess I’ll be dropping my subscription Nov. 7… Sigh.

Friday Five - A tad late :)

Taking my cue from Henry, I’ll do the Friday Five, since it’s about cars.

1. What vehicle do you drive?
1987 Volvo 740 Turbo Intercooler Wagon. It was bright red, but the paint has started to fade. It’s a truly amazing car, with nearly 240,000 miles on the odometer. It’s a pretty rare car, since it has the M46 manual transmission. And I love it.

2. How long have you had it?
I bought it in June of 2002, so a year and few months. This makes it the second-longest time I’ve gone driving the same car.

3. What is the coolest feature on your vehicle?
Oh, there are so many. The panic button, probably. Or the old carphone. Or the crank-open sunroof. I’d say those are my favs. But there’s also the amazing detail Volvo puts into just about everything, like the placement of the fuses, and the toolkit. Plus it’s incredibly safe.

4. What is the most annoying thing about your vehicle?
It can be kinda expensive to repair, I suppose. Also, I get about 25-26 MPG on the highway, and I wish it was a little higher.

5. If money were no object, what vehicle would you be driving right now?
Daily driver? Quite possibly the new Volvo S60R.

Grampa was in town

… last night. We ate at Casual Joey’s up by Carrier Circle. There was way too much food served for the four seniors I was dining with, so I got to take all the leftovers home :) Meals for a week, I should guess.

They were passing through Syracuse on their way to visit my family in Maine.

L-R Don, Elnora, Rita, Grampa, Me

What wrong impressions?

Americans had the wrong impressions about the war, apparently. I think we all pretty much knew it but there’s a new study out about it. A nice article with pretty graphics is here.

Most Americans getting the wrong impressions from FOXNews.com? Who would have thought?

Woo digital camera goodness

Thanks to our friends at CompUSA and Lexar, I have digital camera operation now. No drivers to install, no horrible UIs, just another drive letter that shows up when I plug it in :)

So here are some pictures of what I’ve been doing over the past… month or so. They’ll be put up in the gallery, when I create a gallery, which may be later rather than sooner.

So, a couple weekends ago I went to the German Festival with Stephen.

Rocktacular

And Fine German Automobiles

Somewhere in there I saw a show

And went bowling