I went to the CompUSA nearby my office yesterday to find a PCMCIA adapter for my camera’s flashmedia, and while I was there, I played with the new iMac and iPod up close. I was very impressed with the engineering on both products- wow. I love the size, shape, feel, and interface of the iPod. I would love to buy one of these if I could hook it into my home stereo system and get high-quality sound from it. I do like the fact that it now can hold contacts and calendar information; I would actually have a reason to sell the Palm and buy an appliance that handled more than one task. eBay has a bunch of new Palm IIIxe’s for $75 or so. Unfortunately, the cheapest iPod is $299, and it’s only 5 GB.

Midnight in a Perfect World Department:
I found a link off kottke.org about Gracenote, better known as CDDB, the helpful folks that provide the track information when you pop your new CD in the drive. I poked around, and found this link to the DJ Shadow bonus content. Pleasantly surprised, I popped the disc in my player on the PowerBook and hit the site. I was greeted by this message.

grrrr

I know this is not Shadow’s fault for setting it up like this, but shit, man, is it too hard to take the extra half-hour to add the code in to make this stupid site compatible with Macs as well? Thanks a lot, guys. I would take a wild stab here and say that there’s a good chance a large percentage of his fans use a Mac as their primary machine, and that Macs were used to produce the album.

It seems that it is impossible to find the frickin’ batteries for my cellphone anywhere besides the AT+T store. I’d like to be able to walk in somewhere and buy them, instead of paying for the shipping as well, but it’s looking more and more like I have to bite the bullet.