Two new toys

This is way off topic, but I couldn't resist.

Toy #1

Bought myself a 15 gig iPod. Basically, this is me throwing in the towel on even trying to do work on my laptop while I travel (and I have a lot of travel coming up in May). Since I find the tedium of air travel to be agonizing, this is my hi-tech pacifier. And I'm already in love with it. I've already moved about 1.5 gig of MP3s onto it (all legit, by the way) and it works like a champ. Eventually I'll compare it's native AAC format.

It came in a perfect black cube (something of a Steve Jobs trademark) and every aspect of it so far has been done right ... except I can't get it to charge off my laptop's firewire port. Another plus: the visualizer for iTunes (the desktop program) is a licensed version of G-Force. I guess it's time to uninstall MusicMatch.

Amazingly, I ordered this from Apple at the set-price ($299) late in the afternoon on Sunday and it arrived here this morning (Tuesday!) and it has been custom engraved. And it was shipped FedEx from Shanghai! Oh, if you find an iPod at some airport engraved with "Howard Lewis Ship howardlewisship.com" ... that's mine. Give me a call so I can get it back!

Apple knows how to do these things right. Easy to use, and I keep finding new features. Sound quality with my Boise noise-canceling headphones is terrific. I'm ready to travel anywhere.

Toy #2

This one's virtual ... it's the Google AdSense banner over on the right side of this page. I rather doubt I'll drive enough traffic to earn more than some spare change but to me it's fascinating how it scans the content of the page (presumably from Google's cache) and produces pretty on-target ads. I'm slightly annoyed by the Struts and JSF training ads I've seen on a few of the archive pages, but so be it.