This iPod is incredible. It’s a great experience to have a big plurality of your music collection with you at all times, in a tiny little box as big as a deck of cards. And it’s great to listen to everything on shuffle, hearing old favorites next to new CDs next to things I cherished ten years ago but haven’t heard in ages because they were on a compilation CD buried somewhere in my apartment. I’ve been ripping CDs nonstop, and I’m barely filling up the 20 gigs of space. I’ve got about six gigs on there, and another gig or so of stuff I’ve ripped today.

I went to Best Buy today, the new one in Chelsea. It was a minor pain in the ass because there wasn’t an N/W train running to Manhattan, so I had to get on the 7. Then I got on an F, and it took me right to the door of this new place. The whole store is actually underground, and it’s big for a store in Chelsea, although it’s probably one of the smallest Best Buys I’ve been in. I went on a CD rampage, and here’s what I got:

• CKY - Infiltrate, Destroy, Rebuild
• CKY - Volume 1
• Twisted Forever - A Tribute to the Legendary Twisted Sister
• Iron Maiden - Powerslave
• Iron Maiden - Piece of Mind
• Iron Maiden - Somewhere in Time
• Iron Maiden - Iron Maiden
• Orgy - Vapor Transmission
• NWA - Greatest Hits
• Green Day - Kerplunk
• Dead Kennedys - Give Me Convenience or Give Me Death

The Iron Maiden CDs are all the new “full cover” versions, with shitty bonus tracks available as multimedia only. I should’ve bought them all five years ago when they were in the cool Castle reissues with a bonus CD in a brilliant box, but I’m an idiot. I don’t have any of them on CD - all of my old Maiden stuff was on vinyl. The CKY is new to me, but I really like them a lot - I first heard them in the Jackass movie. The rest of the list were impulse purchases or stuff that was at a good price, so there you go.

I also picked up a copy of The Sims for PS/2, not really knowing much about it except that a lot of people like it. I played it for an hour or so this afternoon, and it is a total pain in the ass. You have to tell your dude what to do: eat, crap, bathe, watch TV, learn stuff, pick up the house, etc etc. If you don’t do stuff, your meters go down. For example, if you don’t talk to other family members, your social meter goes down. If you don’t watch TV or listen to the radio, your fun meter goes down. And you never, ever have time to do everything. So basically, it’s like real life. And I can’t manage to keep my own house clean or eat three square meals a day, so there’s not a chance I can do it on the computer. Despite this, it’s hard to put down. Go figure.

OK, gotta get out of here and get some stuff done.

The iPod is here. I got it on Wednesday, and I’ve been happily adding songs to it and toting it around to work and back, and I’m pretty impressed with it sofar. I’ve only used it with Windows so far; I bought the Windows model (which is formatted for Windows and not HFS+ for the Mac) and it came with a copy of MusicMatch that’s been modified for the iPod. So when I plug in the iPod with a firewire cord, MusicMatch opens and asks me if I want to sync up my music. I can also look at the iPod as if it was my E: drive, and even stash files there, in case I want to put them on another computer later. You can’t do anything with the files, although now the iPod has some rudimentary organizer capability if you put vcard or vcal files on it.

Overall, I have a lot of good things to say about the device. The UI is pretty slick, a very quality product that one would expect from Apple. The unit itself looks great, very futuristic yet refined, unlike the cheap plastic cases on most MP3 players. It’s also very small, only 7 ounces and smaller than I’d expect a 20 Gig drive plus player to be. The display is incredibly crisp and readable, with a great font. It sounds good, it holds a lot, and it’s very easy to update. Plus it has some long-range batteries that are automatically charged when you plug in the firewire cord.

There are a few minor issues, but nothing huge. First, the chrome back of the case looks great but instantly became a huge smudge and is impossible to clean. And I already scratched it. Also, the clip on the remote control is very tiny and a bit impractical. And the stock earbud headphones didn’t work for me, so I went for a pair of Sony vertical in-ear phones. And I wish it had more games on it - there is a breakout game, but nothing more. Other than that, very happy with everything on it.

Not much else is going on here, except that I am relatively brain dead from the temps outside and the minor cold I am nursing right now. I think I am going to the grocery store after work to buy a bunch of comfort-type food and then I’ll lock myself in the apartment and sleep through the weekend. There are three days, so hopefully I will get to mess with the computer all weekend, and watch the backlog of movies I have sitting around the house.

Oh yeah, it is valentine’s day. I would go on a small tirade about this day and the expectations of people and how I don’t like to deal with it when I am single and alone, but it’s not really worth the effort. My only consolation is that I will probably go to Rite-Aid tomorrow and buy a bunch of candy for 50% off.

I think most of the computer upgrade disaster is over. I now have a new monitor, a new video card, and a new Linux installation. It took me about six hours to get everything installed with Linux and Windows 2000, most of that being Linux. I had to back up 9 gigs of personal info and work onto CD-R, then install RH8 three times, then I was stuck for an hour because networking didn’t work, and it turns out it was because I entered the wrong thing for the fucking gateway. Now, all is mostly well, except I have to undo all of the stupid Red Hat bells and whistles and get back to an actual functional operating environment. And as I say this, emacs looks deranged with all of these stupid banners and widgets and extra bullshit they have affixed to every side of my text window. They should put Richard Stallman on a hidden government installation hidden in the middle of the Nevada desert somewhere and do the world a load of good.

So now I have this monstrous screen - 21.1” actual viewable size, with a resolution of 1600x1200. It’s big enough that I can have a browser window opened to the maximum size and still have a fuckload of space. Text is very tiny, but I am too greedy to set it to a larger size. We’ll see how it works when I get some real writing underway.

Anyway, the monitor is cool. Also, the router fuckup let me figure out what was wrong with the Navy Seals game, and I got to play that online for a bit tonight. I totally got my ass kicked, but it’s pretty fun. And my iPod is on the way - it should be here tomorrow. It was back-ordered, so I slapped down another $200 to upgrade to the 20 Gig version, and it is in stock. So I’ll be all set there.

Very tired, and feeling a bit sick. Computer upgrades always stress me out, but at least it’s a short week next week…

My MiniDisc player broke! AGAIN! I just bought the fucking thing last April or something. And it’s a Japanese model, so I can’t return it, I can only put it on the slow boat and pay more than it originally cost to get it back in a year or two.

So I decided to buy an iPod. It looks like the best solution, and it is more compact and easier to work with. The only problem is getting it to work with Linux, but it appears there are hacks out there. The other option is to burn all of my CDs on my Windows partition and then install iTunes or whatever the Windows version of the software is on there. I’ll figure that out after I get it. I ordered the standard 5Gb model - I figure that should work for now.

I also decided to blow even more money and get a new monitor and video card. I got a Matrox G550 Millenium card - I was tempted to get a Radeon with twice as much memory, but the Matrox has Linux support, and that means more than billions of polygons a second or whatever. I also got a ViewSonic 20.1” LCD monitor. It’s very cool looking, black, has built-in speakers and microphone, and does 1600x1200. So I should be very happy once that bitch is on my desk.

I almost forgot - the books got here yesterday. They look good, and I’m happy with them. If you’re reading this and you want a copy, send me an email with your address and I’ll send you one for free. I only have ten of them, but I’m sure less than ten people read this regularly, so there you go.

It snowed like a motherfucker last night, and everything’s white outside. I wish I could get out there with the camcorder before it turns to grey sludge, but I’m here at work.

I feel like I missed a day somewhere, like I forgot to sleep for 24 hours and I can’t catch up. I took a sleeping pill Sunday, so on Monday I felt drunk and underwater and drugged and could barely think straight. I tried to fight this with caffeine and sugar and sleeping with my eyes open, but all I could think of was going home, getting into bed, falling asleep for days. My friend Bill was in town for the day, so we came back to my place, hung out, watched DVDs, played Red Faction, ate Thai food, and that was cool. A few hours of hassling with Premiere, and by midnight, it was bedtime, and… I was wide awake. I spent forever falling asleep, only to awake to the feeling that I missed a day somewhere.

Sunday night, when I took the Tylenol PM, I had the most fucked up terror nightmares ever. Some mystical force was attacking me on the subway, in some mathematical fashion, and I was so scared of it, I was yelling numbers or something, and I am pretty sure I was really yelling because it was the sort of thing where you try to scream in a dream and you can barely form the words or work the vocal chords. It was a total your-life-is-ending, Mothman conspiracy type of thing. I was hiding at Marie’s house and sleeping on her floor, and she vanished, and both of her cats were walking circles around me and talking, like it was some kind of Satanic ritual. (She actually has three cats, but one is newer, so she was not included. You ever notice how stuff in dreams is never up to date? Like how your dreams always happen in your childhood house?) Anyway she vanished, and then her dad showed up and took all of us on a tour of Knott’s Berry Farm, and I felt really guilty for interrupting the whole seance terror thing. I don’t remember much of the dream after that. But the terror part was pretty fucked up, and it bothered me for hours into the morning. I’ve been having more and more defined dreams, and I really hope that is an indicator that I will get off my butt and start writing something soon. My dreams were the best during the writing of Rumored, and it was no coincidence or anything.

So anyway. My tax refund is done and on the way to the bank, but I am torn between buying a gigantic monitor, going on a vacation, or just putting the damn thing in the bank for retirement. I would love to sit in front of 1600x1200 on a flat screen, but I was talking to Bill yesterday about land, houses, and all of that stuff, and it makes me think about that, too.

Not much else. Still very windy. I had a nice bit of Deja Vu this morning walking to work, in a crisp air of about 40 degrees with the rain just about to explode from the clouds. For some reason, it really reminded me of the early spring rains of Bloomington about ten years ago, walking around town without a car and with too much open road in front of me. It’s strange to think that was ten years ago, but it was. Damn.

Gotta call Ray. His mom is in town, and it’s even money that he put six .44 slugs in her head for some random reason. The parental cross-country buffer zone is great, but it means you have to put up with a years’ worth of cached misery in a week of time.