This year’s birthday spoils:
– iPod Nano
– Novint Falcon
– NFS Undercover
– BF2142 Deluxe (for the living room PC)

I ended up working half a day today, spent the 2nd half being productive and hanging out with the dog.

I went and got my winter tires off the car, I think we’re safe for snow. If it comes now I just won’t go anywhere 🙂
I spent that time waiting listening to my iPod – I was totally that guy in the store with the iPod on. I meandered around Home Depot, looking at some bathroom stuff, and I found a fence I liked. I picked up a rake, and walked back to pick up my car. I didn’t really think that much of it, but people look at you funny when you walk into a waiting area with a rake.

It wasn’t too long, though I noticed something odd about the iPod touch. Even if you have video in your audio playlist it won’t make it to your iPod unless you add the playlist under the video section. I have this thing about rating. I love rating my music, and now that I’ve perfected moving my whole Library (album art, comments, ratings, along with all the files themselves) I’ve gotten more serious about it.

1 star – don’t like it, don’t like it at all – I’ll probably delete later
2 star – I appreciate it, but I don’t like it enough to have it be played in my background music
3 star – background music
4 star – really good
5 star – makes me stammer when attempting to describe, tear up, or jump up and down
Armin Van Buuren – Shivers (Rising Star Mix) is a good example of what I’d give a 5.

I set up a running playlist of only non-rated files listing the newest out of whatever size, or number of files I restrict it to – but never put much of a dent in it, at least not until I got Jamie’s old iPod. It was kinda broken, had synching issues – but she gave it to me for helping with her computer and I got it to mostly work. Doing things very patiently I could reload it ever 5 synchs or so and I’d get about 4 days worth of ratings at a time before I’d have to reload the firmware on it. With an iPod I could now rate the music during the day in the car or at work – I got a lot done.

It eventually frustrated me to the point of crushing it, so of course I took it apart to check it out. I’ve been non-rating MP3 playering since, at least I had a backup. Now I’m back in the groove. I also had to get a new case because the neoprene DLO case I had for the 1st gen nano covered the bottom 40% of the wheel on the new model – bastards, change it juuuuuust enough.

So I got BF2142 all working for the weekend – coupld of the guys are coming out and we’ll have a multi-computery dethmatch of deth, so wanted to make sure all was in tip top shape. I also just installed NFS – I know it’s going to be corny, but lets go see what they did with the graphics and this new “Heroic driving engine”.