What do you do on YOUR day off?

Well, I have a bonus day off, and even though I'm in the middle of a busy project and missing a day seems like a bad idea, I'm staying away from the office today (although keeping in touch with work via email and iChat) and taking care of some of the stuff that I have let slide in the past few weeks (largely because of the busy project at work). So, what did I do today? Well, after dropping the girl off at daycare, I walked down to Chapters to try and spend some birthday money.

No luck there. It turns out that I'm too busy to read much these days, so I couldn't see myself buying a book because I don't stand a chance of reading it during the rest of the year. I already have three books out of the library (two unopened) and a stack of unread magazines to work my way through. Another book? Not sensible. So, instead I went to Starbucks and read one of those unread magazines for a while while I drank my coffee and had a muffin. I read a couple of interesting articles: one about a scientist who's field is "molecular gastronomy". Did you know that if you cook an egg for an hour at 65 degrees C -- exactly -- you get a much better texture and flavor than the standard boil-for-ten minutes recipe. Of course, it takes an hour. According o the article, you'll find these "65 degree eggs" on the menu in restaurants in France.

Anyway, came home and on the way started fretting about losing time on the project, so when I did get home I peeked the old email, checked in with the team, and decided that I could probably live without doing too much work today. I plan to go for a run (a long one), do some chores around the home, and perhaps catch up on some learning tasks that I set myself some time ago that have started piling up. Gotta keep the brain lubed up. Maybe I'll do some work, but stuff unrelated to the stressy project.

It's hard to take a day off because you get the sense of standing still in a sprint, but it's good to relax too, as well as take some time to catch up on non-urgent things. If I was more caught up with my personal stuff I might have gone up to Cypress and tried out my new (1 year old ow), unused snowboard. But no point in making plans like that. I'll bet the next day off is a long way away.

Best of Everclear

As a generally honest person, I am making an effort to legitimize my digital music collection over time. I've picked up a few MP3s at various places online (like Napster, back in the day), but was mostly drawn to it for the 'convenience' aspect, not so much for the 'free' side.

Anyway, I'll occasionally go through my collection in iTunes, find some tracks that I like and picked up online, and then see if they're in the iTunes store. If so, I'll buy them, or as I did recently, buy the whole associated albums. This has proven to be an incredibly good way to find new songs I like. Most of my illicit mp3s are "hit singles" from bands I'm otherwise not familiar with, so buying the whole album gives me a little more exposure to their music and this proved especially so with Everclear's "The Best of Everclear" (I'm partial to 'greatest hits' albums these days).

Some great songs on this album: "Wonderful" is the song I had before, but I really like "AM Radio", "Volvo Driving Soccer Mom", and "Sex With a Movie Star". They also do a decent cover of "Brown Eyed Girl" and a handful of other songs that are very listenable. I used to have an impression of Everclear as a band that ran a little heavier than my taste went, but I've been listening to this album for a week or so now and it's the best $12 I've spent recently.

Problem

The problem with my new iPod is that it has all the same songs on it as my old iPod.

Opening an iPod - Part II

I have written before about the experience of opening an iPod as compared with other music players -- in the context of the first impression with a new product. I just got a new iPod so I thought I'd post an update.

In my previous post (which I'm too lazy to go find right now), I drew the comparison between Apple's products and Creative's. In summary, Apple's packaging was so well designed and beautiful that a customer's first experience with the product was nearly joyful, while the first experience in opening a Creative player was having to hack through thick plastic to get at the device. When finished opening the Creative player, you were left with a pile of awkwardly shaped garbage that you had to throw away. When finished opening the iPod, all you had to toss was a bit of shrink wrap.

The new 5G iPod boxes are much smaller than the previous 3G boxes because you now get less stuff -- no dock or case, for example. The box itself is about the size of about four CD cases in a box set. Once the shrink wrap was off, the new box was a little harder to open than the old one -- it wasn't obvious how to actually get the thing open (it slides out of a 'sleeve', just like a box set of CDs would). In the end I figured it out, but not before I'd opened the 'wrong end'.

Once you've removed the box from the sleeve you break the seal and open the interior box, which folds out into two halves to reveal on the right hand side what looks like a photo of an iPod with the words "Don't steal music." on the screen. But it's not a photo, it's the iPod, which has a very flat surface and is packaged to be exactly flush with the rest of the packaging. Very nice to look at, but again, a little harder to get at.

The accessories are packaged in the left side of the box (there are icons for CD, USB and headphones on the top of the box to cue you to open it). The collection of stuff in there include a vinyl case (which looks far too small, but does fit -- very snugly -- because the new iPods are so thin), some CDs and a package of "wires". The "wires package is a sealed pouch, which is nicely notched for easy opening.

I won't cover the rest of the experience (like how Firewire's no longer supported), because I was mostly concerned with the packaging. Overall I'll give this "iPod opening experience" a score of 8/10. Still pretty good, but not quite as nice as the 3G iPod.

Blogger Surfing

Whenever I'm at a web browser and have a few minutes to kill (which, is virtually never these days), especially after I do a new blog post, I'm as likely as not to go "blogger surfing", which is just hitting the "next blog" button at the top of the page to see what comes up. It rarely disappoints. I have a headache right now and don't feel like working. Here's what I hit today:

Burning Questions - a blog about Australian feminism


Muhammad and Me - Bobby Wheelock offends Muslims by drawing cartoons of Muhammad in everyday situations: studying for midterms, riding bicycles, planting trees.

Ladies First - These ones are my favourite: People who totally customize their blogger sites and spend a lot of time. This particular girl was peeved because she went shopping and had to wait in line. It's so much fun to peer in on people's lives like that. David Brin talked about the death of privacy, but I had no idea it would be so voluntary.

Waffle Queue - Not sure what to make of this, but there's an interesting story here about how this girl got sued (and essentially won).

Askewed Thoughts - The blog of some guy who's name happens to be Brett and who lives here in Vancouver. He also owns a Mac. Some kind of Python luminary, or something.