Only X Shopping Days Till Xmas

Yeah, yeah.

Xmas Shopping

In the company of RJA and Serdic, I accomplished a great deal of my xmas shopping (at least as it concerns my lovely wife); the remainder, I am confident, will be completed this Friday in the company of the Rocket and the Greek.

We did all our shopping in about an hour and then enjoyed the fine cuisine and eye candy of Moxie's. Their new special dessert, this sticky toffee thing, is amazing.

Snow

It continues to snow, in outright defiance of my preferences.

Bastards.

Fashion Sense

In the winter, I wear winter boots. They're too warm to comfortably wear all day, so I keep sandals at work and change into them once I get there. And, yes, I don't bother losing the socks first.

This is provoking some measure of disquiet amongst my friends at work.

A Review of the iPod Touch

Music

Playing music is what iPods do, and this one is no exception. Not much to say except that the full-touch-screen interface is comfortable and a joy to use.

Wireless

This is where you seriously start getting into "I'm In the Future!" land. The iPod doesn't seem big enough to have a full-size wireless card in it, which is why it seems slightly unreal when you surf the web on it. The interface is very well thought out, especially bookmarks and navigation, and easy to use. The scaling is as slick as you'd expect.

I'm particularly pleased that it remembers the network settings you give it, so you only have to type in that WEP key once. It'll just know how to work with that network from then on.

Using the keyboard is fairly straightforward. You'd probably get better speed with an actual BlackBerry-style keypad, but then, it'd be fugly and you'd be losing screen real estate. I'm quite happy with the key entry as it is.

Pictures

The iPod Touch has the ability to host a photo gallery. I have one or two complaints, but they're minor. For one thing, unlike music or movies, photos don't have the option of being manually loaded via iTunes -- I can't just drag and drop photos into a directory or anything. I have to point iTunes at a directory and let it sync them to my iPod. Also, it doesn't do more than one level of subfolders. It'll give you the top level of directories but everything in all directories under those get flattened and dumped into the initial set of subfolders.

Once it's on the iPod, though, it's pretty slick.

I loaded it with pictures of the house to start with, just to have something on there, but I was having problems imagining what I would use this for. I'm not the sort of person to carry pictures of my kids at Six Flags just so I can pull it out during a conversation about the funny and cute things my kids did at Six Flags and bore some poor schmuck half to death. Then, it hit me.

I've loaded it with images of all 3,000+ Vampire cards, sorted into folders by type. My iPod is now a portable V:TES card reference. You wouldn't believe how handy it is while building a deck.

Movies

I haven't really done much with the movies feature, other than load a small movie onto the iPod so I could try it out. Movies have to be converted into a different format to be played on the ipod, which disinclines me to use it without a good reason. Sooner or later I'll probably download some episodes of TV but I'm not convinced that watching video during my commute is something I'll really get into.

Other Stuff

The iPod Touch also has a calculator (which is seeing a lot of use in combination with the Vampire card index I mentioned), Contacts, Calendar, Clock (including stopwatch and alarm) and a YouTube link. I haven't used most of these features much yet but I expect that I will in the future.

Summary

It's awesome. How awesome? Imagine something that's really, really awesome. This is better than that.

Awesome.