davidrickard.net

I bought myself one of the new iPod classics. My older iPod (a third-generation model) has served me well, but it has had a few problems. The battery went through a period of only holding a low charge, which has since righted itself, and the disk inside it has developed bad sectors, so some songs would skip randomly. On the whole, it has been good though, and proven itself quite reliable. It’s fairly bulky, heavy, and I’ve nearly filled it.

I bought a black 160Gb model, which is four times bigger than my old one, plus it has colour, and video/photo support. It has quite a few niceties, like video playback, a much bigger screen, better battery life, and a search facility.

My first impressions are good. The interface is a little sluggish sometimes though, although it seems to sort itself out as it caches data.  I bought some replacement Sennheiser MX51 headphones, for two reasons. Firstly, the Apple headphones are usually pretty rubbish, and second, they’re incredibly obvious and have ‘mug me, I have an iPod’ written all over them. The Sennheisers are quite bland by comparison, but have fairly good sound.

I need to get a new dock stand for it, as it doesn’t quite fit in my old stand, but otherwise, it works well, and I’m quite pleased with it.

I had one of those mad moments this morning. I got up, and sat and stared at some stuff under the desk and thought, “I’m going to tidy this stuff up today”. After breakfast, I still felt like doing it, so embarked on a mission to move a load of stuff about. The end result was a slightly more organised chaos than I already had. My books are now (mostly) in one place, and some stuff that was buried under the desk in the corner is now up on shelves and accessible.

I also tidied my desk off a bit, as I was slowly losing things (like my keyboard) under piles of paper and the like. In doing so, I found various odd things

• A plethora of screws
• Various mountings for my CD/DVD racks
• Multiple keyrings
• Guitar picks
• More pens than I know what to do with, mostly freebies from Infosec
• A minidisc – I’ve not used my minidisc in YEARS
• A stack of CDs and other disks, most unlabelled

I also found enough fluff and crumbs to make me feel a little bit disgusted that it had gotten so bad. It’s odd though – if you aren’t really paying attention, you can accumulate all sorts of rubbish without really doing much. I could tidy as I go, but… eh, effort.

In unrelated news, I’m attempting to post this blog entry from within Word 2007. I saw it demoed at a Microsoft event I went to this week, so I thought I’d try it.