reesesWeb

Pursuant to an earlier post, I bought the Creative Zen Vision :W player in advance of a trip to NYC last week.

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.

This is the HD STB/PVR that Comcast supplies.

Motorola DCT 6208 product page

Cost = $10/mo, or $3/mo for HD. (Not sure if the box is the same if you just get HD, or if it's the 6200) In Bethesda, MD.

Firewire output is output-only. Use VirtualDVHS on the Mac to record. Not sure about rumors that you can expand capacity with an external firewire diskpack if output-only limitation is true. Appears that most content is not 5c, so there aren't any recording problems right now.

Inspired by the many "this is what I'm running on my Mac" posts, I felt compelled to sheep-up and add my own voice to the rumble.

• Path Finder

I just started using this based on an unremembered blog entry somewhere, but the big win for me is the "Drop Stack": rather than keep multiple finder windows open for copying, or having to drag a folder to the shelf for easy access, you can push files onto this stack, and then pop them off when you've navigated somewhere else. While the default intra-filesystem operation is "move", it appears only to copy between filesystems.

Despite the fact that I hated my Treo 600 after a year of ownership, I bought a Treo 650 soon after its release. My three-day opinion is that I like it more than the 600, but I've made exactly one phone call, and that lasted as long as it took to say,"Hey. I'll meet you there. See you in five minutes."

I spent much of the Saturday after opening the box building a script to receive jpeg images as attachments via email, extracting the attachments, storing them on my server, and then uploading them to Flickr. I monkeyed with exim for SMTP auth and TLS, which is in that category of enjoyable activities called "wasting my life dorking with stupid Linux."

Goodbye Tsugumi, by Banana Yoshimoto

I like all of Banana Yoshimoto's books except Amrita. They flow the same way for me as certain Ernest Hemingway and Charles Bukowski books. I seem to get absorbed more easily into books written in the first person, and in a more conversational style. Third-person writing seems too cold for me.