New Toys

I'm a very slow adopter of high technology, which is bizarre since my job is to help create high technology. The problem is that stuff changes so fast, and lots of ideas come out that sound awesome, and then 6 months later they sound crappy. Two of the things I've been putting off for the longest time Digital Cameras and MP3 players. Actually, neither of these ever sounded crappy, I just haven't been impressed with the affordable technology until now.

Digital Cameras are a great idea... most all I ever want to do with pictures is get them in my computer and email them or post them on a website. With traditional cameras this is a real pain... take the picture, get it developed (time consuming, expensive), scan it (time consuming), clean it up in Photoshop or GIMP (also time consuming). Digital cameras are a fixed cost, and it has the added benefit that you don't have to worry about film expiring or getting it ruined by the X-Ray machine. No scanning necessary... you just plug the camera in and it looks like a generic SCSI device; simply copy the pictures as JPEGs onto your computer. My brother-in-law works at Sony, and he got me a great deal on a DSC-V3. You can read all about camera in the DSC-V3 Camera Review.

Back in 1998 some company released an MP3 player that looked like a Discman but played ISOs of MP3s. I told myself, "I'll wait until they make one that plays DVDs of MP3s". Then they came out with those, and I told myself, "I'll wait until they come out with something smaller, like a laptop HD or flash memory". Then they came out with those, and I told myself, "I'll wait until they come out with something that has enough storage to hold my entire collection and then some". Apple finally came out with a 60 GB iPOD, which means it can hold my entire music collection (about 35 GB) and still have plenty of room to grow. I love my iPod Photo. The iCarPlay from Monster is a great FM Transmitter (at least around Fort Collins).

So, I've been spending a good portion of my free time lately playing with my new toys. It takes a *long time* to load all of your music onto your computer and then transfer it to the iPod, but this should help make travelling quite a bit easier.

For those of you playing along, I moved to Fort Collins, Colorado in January to start a new job with HP. Now that I have a digital camera, I finally took pictures of my new house and new car. The house is a 3 bedroom, 2 bath house on the edge of town in a subdivision named Registry Ridge. Fort Collins is rapidly expanding to the south, and I imagine in 3-5 years Registry Ridge won't be considering to be "on the edge". My new car is a 2005 Subaru Legacy GT Limited. If you're considering getting an AWD car, I highly recommend looking into Subarus. I like this car way better than the Audi A4 or A6 that I drove. Check out pictures of My New Life In Colorado.