Gadgetphillia
I love gadgets. I really try to be practical about the gadgets I buy, but this is a subjective statement. My ideas about practical may differ greatly from the vast majority of you out there. Somehow I manage to save enough money to pay for a year of college, but just barely. The portion of my paychecks that are not spent on Mountain Dew and snacks is left over for gadgets. I have managed to restrain my self to some degree here at college, where the paychecks are always smaller and need to go more places.
I am very appreciative of my early experience with pocket knives, and leatherman tools. Yet my first really electronic gadget in the modern sense was an mp3 player. I decided that I needed a Rio 500. Whenever it was that I bought it it was available in a bulk price of like $140. Seemed like a great deal for a 64MB flash player.
I loved that little thing, it was so solid and compact. It had a slot for Smart Media cards. That particular media was really nice because it was so thin and small. I took that player all over with me for a year, and popped ear buds in whenever some particular teacher was getting really boring. I eventually wore the thing out and it just sorta quit working. To even get it to turn on I had to jiggle the battery just right. It was really done for when it would no longer let me transfer songs to it. Everytime I plugged the USB cable in the thing turned itself off.
I really miss that thing and have considered going to find one just like it to see if I can get one for a lot cheaper. If I decided to get an MP3 player I would probably want a harddrive based one like the Creative Zen. You see, I have already had my iPAQ 3635 for a year and a half now and am very very happy with it. I laid down top dollar for it and wasnt going to pay for a seperate player when the iPAQ would do jsut as well with a CF card in it. Now the iPAQ is frustrating me, when playing mp3�s it tends to run the batteries completely dead without telling me. This is bad, that means I lose everything since the last time I had backed it up. The iPAQ is a Jack of all Trades, but certainly not a master of music playing. I doubt I will actually buy anything soon, my bills and expenses are starting to add up. I have little to spare for the next few years.
My advice for the day is: �When in doubt, use your fire breathing war elephants.�