I was dithering over the past few weeks about replacing the Core2Duo/2.0Ghz FrankenMacMini I've been using for a while because I keep bouncing against the 2GB limit. I was thinking about getting the 2.8Ghz iMac because it can hold 4GB and hey, I'd get a free 24" monitor out of the deal.

I went back and forth in my head, wishing that there were something similar to the "high end" Psystar OpenScam^H^H^H^HMacs, but made by Apple. I have a long chain (6TB!) of firewire drives, and I'd kind of like to get some of those moved inside the machine to kill the noise. Not possible with the iMac.

I was still on the fence, then I thought, 4GB is ok now, but I imagine this time next year, I'll wish I had more.

So, I was wandering through the mall near our house and went into the Apple store. An amazingly long time later, I walked out with an 8-core Mac Pro being carted along by a miserable-looking 'genius'.

Two days later, of course, they bumped the top speed of the iMac, effectively dropping the price.

I have to say, I like my Mac again now that it's tolerably fast. I was really getting sick of the old one. (which, if you want it, email me at the secret address and I'll give it to you.)

When I bought this house, it was new, so we didn't have a clothing washer or a drier. Dryer? De-moistifier.

Being the dummy that I am, I bought a front-loading washer, because they're cool. I bought the spiffiest one I could find, and discovered that the ultra-high-speed spin cycle feels exactly like a really long 4.5 earthquake when you put the thing on the second floor.

I put up with it for almost a year now (viz., dummy) and finally gave up and bought two packs of these.

No more noise. They block the transmission of the vibrations almost completely, so I actually thought the machine skipped the spin cycle.

That's all. See you in another six months.

I would probably remove this section from my home page.

Yes, I know I'm misusing the term "home page", but bite me, ok?

First off, this thing has just about the worst name in the world. It also has an awful splash screen at startup with a big "ZEN" that I would cover up with my hand so the guy sitting next to me wouldn't punch me in the nads.

That said, it's pretty groovy, with some serious downsides that make me think the PMP market is about where the GPS market was in 2004, right around the time the Nuvi came out and solidified things remarkably.

I'll go through the problems with this player first, because they may be enough to make you run away. It's also about 90% of my content, because it's all well and good if it plays a nice music file, but if you can't use it, it's just a waste of money. Besides, you can get all the positive propaganda you want from the website.

The first is that there is no official Mac support. It's an MTP (Microsoft's Media Transfer Protocol) device, so all the software and support relates to Windows. This is obviously not an issue if all you have or care about is Windows support.

With XNJB, the lack of Mac support isn't a huge deal. You can still push media on, and pull it off, the player. You are pretty limited in media types (careful with ".mp4" files, which will go strange places) and you can't mess around with subfolders yet, but if you're just throwing something in the "Video" or "Music" directory for a train/plane ride, it'll be fine. XNJB is pretty fast over USB, as I was able to transfer a 700.9MB video in about 110 seconds. Not super fast and I wouldn't want to use it as an external drive, but acceptable.

Second, this thing is a brick. I was thinking about getting an iPod Video because it likes the Mac, is well-integrated into iTunes, etc., but when I thought about it, I preferred my Nano if I was actually carrying an iPod around during the day, and the iPod Video has a tiny screen compared to the Creative. It's just not a good compromise device. Instead, I decided to try the Creative as a video player and use a Nano for something I'd want in my pocket. The Creative is about 2-2.5x bigger than my old 3G 40GB iPod, and is less of an obvious "compromise device" than the iPod Video. However, as I mentioned, it's a frickin' brick and you're not going to be walking around with this in your pocket.

Third, codec support is pretty iffy. It doesn't like older versions of MSMPEG4, so if you ripped movies from DVD a few years ago, be ready to re-rip. I would strongly hesitate against transcoding (in general but especially in this case) because the video seems especially jumpy. It also doesn't like AAC or AC3 audio, and of course DRM support is nonexistent, so forget about using your iTunes Music Store files with this. Unfortunately, I ripped all my CDs to AAC and didn't feel up to converting them.

Transcoding audio is a lot easier than video. ffmpeg -i infile.avi -vcodec copy -acodec mp3 -ab 192 outfile.avi works just fine, or you can use VLC's painful command line, which delegates to ffmpeg or mplayer anyway. It's important to avoid variable bit rate audio, because the audio will desync from the video, and then you'll get in that nasty situation where you can't look at actors' mouths without feeling a little sick.

It does seem pretty decent if you stick to the Video Format Recommendations for ZEN Vision/Vision:M page at Creative. The list is limited, but it's better than the iPod.

As for stability, it's a feature that isn't that important to this player. I had to pull the battery twice because I'd hit "Play" for a video and start to fast forward before the video had started. The player hung until I did a hard reset.

It's also incredibly sluggish -- seeking forward or backward can easily cause a 10-second delay before the video will start playing. The player is also unable to process additional seek requests in this period of time, so if I searched, lifted my finger, and searched again, I was out of luck. There's no visual cue when fast forwarding or rewinding, so it should be expected that a user will stop a lot to see where they are.

The last ding I'd make against it is that it has no stand. Some of the Archos devices have a little kickstand that folds out to hold the player up. I was constantly trying to find the right combination of soft but rough surfaces to prop the player up into a viewable angle. Some external cases do have the ability to do this, so consider one a prudent investment.

Those are the negative things, now for a couple brief positive things.

The picture quality is quite nice. It's watchable and not at all embarrassing. It's not great for slow pans or zooms, but for normal movies (and especially, movies on a plane that aren't on a washed out screen overhead or on a 120-degree laptop) it's great.

Widescreen video

A 4:3 video with black bars

The resolution is lower than some other players, but it's still a small screen, and the widescreen format is much better for watching ripped DVDs while on the road. The "screen door" effect hits at about 18 inches from the screen, depending on your eyesight.

The battery life is pretty good, as well. It takes a long time to charge (6h USB, 3h AC adapter), but I was able to watch three 1.5h movies on one charge and have enough left over to listen to a fair bit of an audio book, which uses less power.

Speaking of which, like many of the Creative devices, the audio is much better than an iPod. There's more control, and Creative apparently has some experience with electronic audio gear, and applied some of that knowledge and technology to their players. If your ears get tired of listening to your iPod for hours, you might look at one of the Creative devices, if you can stomach the industrial design.

Also, last but maybe not least, there's a speaker. This thing is so big it has a speaker. That's awesome for starting a movie or audio file while lying in bed at night. I don't like wearing earbuds when I don't have to, but I also don't like packing around speakers.

I didn't get a chance to try the A/V output, but I have it on good cyberauthority that it works about as well as the source material. I forgot my cables and couldn't try it on the hotel TV however.

Kat has this great way of telling me about problems. She'll raise her voice and say something like,"Oh my god."

That's it. She'll wait for me to ask. Because I don't like to encourage that childish behavior, I never ask what she's talking about. So she'll try it again. I'll refuse to ask.

It's important to hold the line firm and be an adult so she learns the proper way to relate.

One of the great things about living in a new house is getting to discover all the construction peccadillos. Especially interesting are the issues that are found due to weather. The rain over the past few days have made life especially unpleasant for earthworms.

Eventually, I asked what she was spazzing out about, and it turns out that a few worms were piling into the house via a narrow opening in a window frame.

It wasn't a big deal, only three...four...five worms crawling into the house, and they were removed outside and discouraged from re-entry with some lemon juice on the windows.

Of course, I'm just adding this to the list of little surprises -- tankless water heater set to 180F, hot water pipe not soldered and leaking into the living room, incredibly easily broken "safety" glass in the door (which is how we were burgled), non-working power outlets on the second floor, etc. At least the roof doesn't leak (yet) and most of the rest of the outdoor wildlife hasn't found a way in yet.

The high point so far (I flee this godforsaken icehole tomorrow) was dinner tonight at Jean-Georges. While the service was the worst of any Michelin-rated restaurant I've ever been to, I have never wanted to lick a plate more. I can remember a time when I really didn't like ginger, but it seems like a silly, silly memento of my distant past.

By "worst service", I don't mean anything especially pejorative. However, I decided to go solo so I could enjoy the meal and not feel decadant if I ordered too much (oink), and the courses were just a little bit rushed. More than once, I had barely finished a dish before the next was on its way. The waitress I had may also have been rather inexperienced as she seemed a little nervous. Maybe she heard of my superstar status and was awed. I felt awkward asking her any questions about the dishes because she looked as if she was really on the spot and unprepared. There were also a few times that I sat there like an idiot because their pace was just a little bit off from mine and I sat with empty plates, glasses, etc., for a few minutes too long.

As for the food, I have become one of those people who sounds completely dorky and pretentious when it comes to criticizing dishes. I remember reading a review, I think of Bouley, where someone complained that a dish was cooked about thirty seconds too long.* I remember rolling my eyes and wishing it wasn't some loser webpage so I could share it with other people. What sort of prat would be so particular?

It turns out, someone who ordered the salmon tonight at Jean-Georges. It was tasty and wonderful, but it was definitely a little overdone, and literally by about thirty to sixty seconds. It was just barely past the preferred peak of preparation. Whether it was carryover or actual cooking, I'm not sure (this was the trainwreck dish), but it was definitely not how I'd expect salmon to be served.

On the bright side, this restaurant is hella inexpensive for its rating. I definitely think it's not a three-star restaurant, nor even really a one-star restaurant, but it's quite nice anyway. I think I'd prefer to go with a group of people so we could focus on something other than the food. Alone, the culinary experience isn't quite strong enough to form the backbone of an evening out.

* Edit: It turns out that the restaurant was actually Jean-Georges, and the review is here.

I decided to do the same thing (not the poster, just the list) and started entering books I remembered. Yes, I was sure I had read more than 750, by at least a factor of two. No, I didn't bother entering all of them because the site's interface stinks rather a lot, with a popup to confirm that you want to add the book for which you just clicked "add to my library".

I'm usually a sucker for those "top 100 American books of the 20th century" or "top 100 books" or "top 100 pop up books" or whatever. I'll breeze through the list and hammer down on my friends how literate I am.

"You got five? I had to go to 37 before I found a book I hadn't read! Pwnt, beyotch!"

Regardless, possibly because of the fact that I'm dealing with a fixed list, most of which I've read, I focus on the "have read" and not the "haven't read". I noticed something different when wading through dozens of thousands of books, trying to string along the books that I finished reading. (No fair counting owned and never opened or unfinished books!)

There are a metric effton of books that I haven't read and probably should have. Also, my literary exposure is _heavily_ biased towards French lit (mainly because of that ill-advised major), with a fair amount of science fiction and contemporary fiction. Lots of post-modernism and cyberpunk, like every guy my age.

However, I am extremely poorly read when it comes to English and American literature in general. There are some books most kids read in elementary school or high school that I never touched. In my defense, my educational path bypassed the chunk of high school that would have exposed me to much of that.

Some of the things that I hadn't read were adapted for another medium or have been so ingrained in our cultural and social consciousness that I believe I know all the relevant parts of the book, but I have never actually read the source literature. Lord of the Flies. Uncle Tom's Cabin. Animal Farm. Almost any Dickens. OK, any Dickens other than A Tale of Two Cities, which was a forced march in 7th grade. Just about any Shakespeare other than The Merchant of Venice, R&J, and the sonnets. Stendhal. Thomas Hardy. Being and Nothingness.

Some "essential" books I haven't read because I tried one or two of the authors' other books and decided the writers were not for me. Dostoevsky screams to mind. My wife (russian language and lit major, although she has redeemed herself) agrees that Dostoevsky is crap. I remind her that the only reason I've read any Dostoevsky was that she made me read The Double and The Idiot when she was back in school and convinced that it was "important".

I love this little reminder. I'm not sure precisely what I'll do with the information. I'm not about to go out and buy all the books mentioned above, just to "complete a list", just as I never buy the books from those silly "Top 100 books..." lists. I had been going through a little bit of a crisis of unavailable literature, though, probably from a) hubris and b) spending less time in bookstores and more time buying books on Amazon. I do wander through a bookstore maybe once a month or so, but I tend to cruise through the areas that interest me, rather than what I used to do -- start at A in the literature & fiction section, and read every book title until I get to Z or until my arm is full. Check out, go home, and read them all.

In the interest of completeness, the partial list of books I have read is here. I doubt I'll finish entering books because the 'free' accounts are limited to 200 books and won't let me enter any more, but it was a fun way to kill an hour or so.

I want a little tube of flavor crystals that I can throw in my mouth, like pop rocks, that break down and re-infuse the rubber with flavored-rubber flavor.

I could buy 'rubber' or 'plain' gum and then pick up any flavor packs I wanted. A side benefit would be similar to those jelly bean "recipes" from the 1980s -- i.e., eat a pineapple jelly bean and a coconut jelly bean and have a pina colada candy experience. You could throw back six parts tomato, one part lemon, one part lime, one part worcestershire sauce, and half a part Tobasco sauce. Chew for a second and toss in a shot of vodka for a Bloody Mary experience.

"Mentos" and a swig of Diet Coke would be a blast.