p e n g u i n d e v i l

I like blogs. I like to have one, and I like for other people to have one. Honestly, I wouldn’t mind if everyone had one. Heck, why not? I don’t spend as much time with them as one might though. Honestly, I wouldn’t even call myself a blogger (I feel like I would need a bigger readership before I could throw that word around…), but I like them. Aside from the great fun and interest in reading them, another great thing about blogs is finding online quizzes you can take.

Over at Thud I stumbled on the Blog Addict quiz, I didn’t rate too high, but I’m not really surprised. But I thought it was fun…

65%How Addicted to Blogging Are You?

But enough about blogs, for there is non-blog tech news. I finally ponied up for DSL. I can hear people saying… “what are you implying? You switched from cable to DSL?”. No, I were dial-up. I’m been 56k since 2000 when I moved away from the DSL that I got in ’98 while I worked for a local ISP. I haven’t had much interest in bandwidth since then. I don’t download much music since the sad demise of the old school Napster (macster) and the original MP3.com, I have never downloaded a movie and I tend to use the same stinky software year after year…

We’re only about an hour into it, and I haven’t really figured out what to do different, since most of my online interest is in text, but I imagine that I will become quite used to it again… As long as I can restrain myself from spending all night downloading Immortal videos from youtube… Something that has consumed too much time while on 56k.

Oh, and stay away from (excessive) Quake III Rocket Arenas…

Speaking of using the same stinky old stuff, after 4-5 years my old 2nd gen iPod is giving me trouble. I think the headphone jack is getting iffy. Yes, I have been interested in getting a new one for years, but I can’t justify the expense (even for a color screen), while I still have a functional one, and who cares what the display looks like? Well? I do. I’ve taken over a Nano for the time being and it’s fresh! Sure, I need to be more selective with what tracks I put on (since it holds less than mine), and the screen is little… But everything looks better, it’s black, the screen is color, the text looks nicer, it has some nice functionality (rating songs on the go? Great!) and, strangely important, you can see the album covers! Now that may sound frivolous for something that just sits in your pocket, but have I devised a justification. With all the song shuffling and such that goes on, albums are losing their albumness, just becoming a bunch of songs. But I change my mind a lot while listening so I am always taking the thing out and switching songs… I feel that seeing the album cover for each song adds a sense of continuity between the tracks on the same album…

Or so I thought today…