Saturday Novermber 12, 2005 4:28 am

The first Saturday I've had off in a month and I wake up at 4 am. Nice. I just can't sleep lately.

So I'm downstairs in my studio updating my new iPod. I have an older one. The last model before Apple added the click wheel. The one with the row of buttons above the wheel. It's pretty good. I gave it to my wife to keep the rugrats entertained in the car. I got the new one.

Like the last one, this one is my Christmas present. It's a pretty extravagent present, I'll admit. But screw it. I work Saturday's. Its pretty nifty. A little buggy though. For instance, if you are playing a video and you pause the video or just surf over to a song and hit the middle button, it will show you that you have switched over to the new song. It lies. The video's picture is gone, but the video's audio continues to play on, in slooowwwmmotiioonnnnn. It's creepy. You have to turn off the iPod to make it stop. You get around this by using the back button to get out of the video completely. Then you can go play a song. I should report this to Apple. They can probably fix it with a software update. They probably already have. Never mind.

It's also slow as hell to update. USB only baby. It takes forever, especially loading up videos. Other that those little drawbacks it's cool as hell. I got the big one of course. I have much, or little depending on how you look at it, to compensate for.

I love the video. I'm trying to figure out a way to pipe the video signal into my Prius display window. You can watch dvds in Japan. I want to watch my iPod here. While I drive. In rush hour traffic.

It takes a while to convert mpegs and .mov file to an iPod compatible format, but I just set those to run overnight. I'm using iSquint which can batch a folder so it's a breeze. The files aren't as small as the ones you get from quicktime and they have more artifacting, but it doesn't show up on the Pod screen and is tolerable when I'm watching on my 13 inch tv at work. Okay. Enough. So I sometimes have to work Saturdays, but I can watch tv at work. It's just that kind of job. A 60 hour week is still a 60 hour week. Alright?

I started this at 4:28. It's now 4:45. I still have about 2 hours to kill before the rest of the family gets out of bed. I guess I'll select another batch of songs to transfer to the new iPod. The last one just finished.

I've got to get some sleep.