New Toys

2005-06-02

I've still not found a place to lay my head, hang my hat or lie in of a Sunday. I think I'm still missing rooms by a fine margin, and may have to wait until the last minute before one sorts itself out (the fantastic distance and near certainty of intercepting rush hours somewhere along the way isn't helping).

But, I'm not in the least bit bothered, because I've been shopping....

First off, I've got a shiny new kite (Ozone Samurai) which should be general purpose enough to fly in most sane conditions. So far the wind has been taunting me. First there's none, then there's too much, then there's none, then I'm busy, then... well, there's been enough to get the lines on and see it in the sky a bit before stalling back to the green earth.

Then there's electronic magicalness. An IDE to USB converter lets me use great, stonking, huge and cheap internal hard drives as removeable media. I'm let down slightly by hateful software, there being nothing but Windows to write NTFS, and no decent UFS/ext3 drivers for Windows. I'm sticking for the moment with NTFS, as at least I can read that on the FreeBSD box, and write to it elsewhere.

To this I've added (in a moment of not reading the specs properly) an mp3 player that can't actually play mp3s. It's one of these Sony network walkman thingies, and it only wants to play music that it's been given by Sony's own software. It mainly deals in ATRAC format, which doesn't deserve much more discussion as I really can't be bothered re-ripping all my CDs just to put them on this. It can do mp3, but only after it's mangled them. Thankfully the mangling seems to be fairly rubbish, so I might have a crack at doing it myself, so gaining the ability to fill the player with music from FreeBSD and, in fact, anywhere else with Perl and USB drivers installed. Oh, and it's a lovely pink colour, which is mostly (if not entirely) really why I got it.

And finally there's the duct tape (not a toy, but a toy-enabler), a stash of rechargable batteries, two pairs of fresh glasses and a nuclear mug to replace the one I left in San Diego.

This purchasing frenzy is probably ended for the time being, as I've still little idea about what I should take with me, what might be there already, what will break, what will last, and what I'll take but ignore the whole time. People who've been before should be a great help in sorting those sorts of questions out, and I've still plenty of time before my bags need to be packed.