Wednesday

I got bored so I took a survey from Rabenstrange's blog:

You paid attention during 97% of high school!

85-100% You must be an autodidact, because American high schools don't get scores that high! Good show, old chap!

Do you deserve your high school diploma?
Create a Quiz

On a sad note, gas is now $4 a gallon at the Arco by my house. I'm debating if I should stop buying gas yet and use up my stash in the garage, or if I should save it in case gas gets more expensive.

New Zen

Last week I acquired my 4^th Mp3 player in 9 years. I wanted a small, flash-based player that I could slip into my pocket for long runs. I got a 4GB Zen V Plus for $40 from the Creative online store during a 1-day sale. It’s about half the size of the new iPod Nanos, a tiny fraction the price, and can play a broader range of media types.

My first Mp3 player was a Casio Cassiopeia, which was technically a windows-based PDA, but I bought it primarily for its mp3 playing capabilities. I kept it for a few months than sold it for a little more than I paid for it on eBay to help pay for my first missions trip to Romania.

My second Mp3 player was actually a dedicated player, the Iomega HipZip. This player took mini-Zip discs (remember those?) which held 40MB each. I was able to buy these discs for $5-10 a piece and could store a whole CD on one. When the cost of flash memory was nearly $50 for a 16MB compact flash card, these were really a good deal. I did have problems with this player and had to get 3-4 of them RMAed from Iomega before I got one that was fully functional. I think my last one is in a box in my shed right now.

My third and more recent player is my Creative Zen Touch. This was the ultimate Mp3 player when it was released in 2004, and thus became my Christmas present to myself that year. It was a tiny bit bigger than my HipZip and quite a bit heavier; being about the size of a deck of cards. This has a 20GB hard drive and a battery that lasts around 30 hours of continuous use. I’ve never filled the drive more than 60% full. It’s also hard drive based so it’s larger and heavier than a flash based player and will skip if banged around, which makes it a poor choice to take running or anything like that. I usually keep it in the bottom of my backpack and use wireless headphones to listen to it all day. Or at work I just set it down somewhere where I’m in range with my wireless headphones most of the time. This is by far the best way to listen to audio books. I have no real issues with my Zen Touch other than I cannot take it running with me. It will still travel in my backpack to school and work, and probably be my primary stereo long into the foreseeable future as it has a higher quality audio output than most Mp3 players sold today, including everything Apple has to offer.

Busy, Busy

I'm thinking of the Veggie Tales song right now about being so busy:

I'm busy, busy, dreadfully busy
You've no idea what I have to do.
Busy, busy, shockingly busy
Much, much too busy for you.

So yeah...
Anyway I'm working on a paper for Negotiation class right now. It's not due for a few hours but I figure I'll try to get it done before class actually starts. My finals are all two weeks from today, and then I'm finally done with school until the end of September. Only one more paper and two presentations left after today and then I can slack off until finals are over. I'll shoot to have a real post done tonight.

Back Now

Been really, really busy with everything lately. We just got back from the Regional Bible Quiz meet in Spokane and managed to get 10th place. So our team is officially the tenth best ranked team for Assembly of God Bible Quiz in all of Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, and I think Alaska as well.

Brenda and I drove separately as we went to an Adobe CS3 workshop at their headquarters while the rest of the team wanted to leave. A pleasant 300 mile drive later we were there. Aside from getting up really early yesterday and today to go to the meet it went well. Devon, Anna, and Melissa had one of the strongest meets I've ever seen from them.

On the way home we stopped by Riverfront Park in downtown Spokane. We had fun and took a bunch of pictures; Trebonte will likely have many of them posted later since his camera actually had a charged battery. Tragically my favorite mug suffered a horrible accident and went bridge jumping, falling 75 feet to its doom. I'll need to find a replacement in the near future, but really don't want to back to Victoria, BC to get a replacement from the only store I've ever seen carry that particular model. I think I know a place that sells the same model but with different designs, so I'll be checking into that in the next few days.

In other news, I'm getting really tired of school and want it over for the school year. Work isn't much better; which is why I need to finish school so I can get a much better job. I had to pay over $3.50 for a gallon of gas for the first time since my last post. I'm currently looking on Craigslist for a futon bunk bed for my room. And I've got nothing else to say at the moment.