Long day today. I'll start with the short and sweet of the actual events.
Went out to get a desk. It rained. That sucked. Went to my parents for a
dinner thing. That was good (except that I couldn't have anything but soup).
Came home. Put desk togeather. Finished paper for work.
So that was the short of the day. The thing is that as I was driving home to
my parents I remembered that I hadn't taken my 3rd antibiotic pill of the day
(to keep swelling in the mouth down or something like that). I'd remembered
to bring it along of course, as I'm a smart boy, but I had no water. "No
problems," I thinks to myself, "I've dry swallowed pills before!"
So I do.
Mistake. For some reason the stupid pill gets lodged somewhere in my
esophagus, just before the stomach. Dinner (soup) and beer, water and tea all
go down just fine. But when I'm done the paper for my meeting on Monday and
decide to go to bed, it starts to hurt. I mean hurt bad. Ever gotten a lump
of rice caught in your throat? Well, something like that, but farther down
and harder to get rid of. In fact, at 2-bloody-30 in the morning I still
haven't gotten rid of it. It seems to get worse when I lie down for a bit,
and I have no clue how to get rid of the stupid thing!
The neighbors would be looking at me funny if they could see in the windows,
cause I've been doing some weeeeiiird stuff in here.
- Standing still with a glass of milk for 5 minutes at a go, taking a
sip every couple of minutes, just sitting and trying to hear what my body is
doing with it.
- Feeling the liquid pass by the obstruction.
- Trying to will it to un-plug.
- Jumping up and trying to loosen things.
- Stroking and pummeling my gut trying to soothe or beat the stupid
thing out.
At this point in time I'm trying to drown it by drinking large amounts of
water, hoping to flush it down. Vomiting isn't high on my list of "stuff I
like to do early in the morning when I'm tired and need to get to bed to go to
work tomorrow and be concious so I can do the work I didn't get done last week
and this weekend," but if worst comes to worst, I'll do it dammit! (<you
hear my you little pill or whatever you are blocking my esophagus!>)
Random note: Since napster has basically
been killed (or legislated out of existance if you want to look at it that
way), my buddy cfreeze pointed me to AudioGalaxy, a system where you can get
music. Basically you use their "satallite" program and run that on your
computer (after setting up an account on their site of course). Then you
search the site, find the mp3s you want and click on the little radar dish
icon. They are put in a queue for downloading by the satallite program. If a
user goes offline that's fine, because the system will continue the download
when they, or someone with the same song, comes back online. It's not as nice
to work with as fara as being able to sort, select bitrates, check sizes, etc
as something like napster or a similar P2P file sharing system, but from what
I can tell, it's pretty sweet.
<pause for another pitcher of water>
MP3s rock too. I got a new car stereo last week, the Kenwood
MP8017, which plays CDs of mp3s as well as all the stuff a normal deck
does. This means that I can have my complete (legally bought BTW) collection
of every Blue Rodeo
album (that's 12 CDs full) fit on a single CD and be able to be played in the
car! A 700meg CD of an average of 7meg songs is, yes, 100 songs (which is
low, as most mp3s are smaller than 7megs). So 10x the music of a standard CD.
It rocks. I have only burned a couple of disks (The Definitive Blue Rodeo
(every album), The Definitive U2 (every album) and a couple of mixes), but
with the amount that can fit on a CD, I think the 24 cd wallet I bought will
last me a while :)
Hmm... didn't realize that there were more than the one from Kenwood
available. Seems they have several
decks available (mine is the low end model).
My only complaint about mine is
not to do with functionality or features, but user interface. Basically it
sucks. I don't think that anyone actually had a mock-up of the system in
their car for real use for any amount of time. The buttons are small
and hard to hit, and feel "mushy", and their arrangement could be much better.
Some buttons (like the one for changing pre-set bass/trebel) are great, but
pointless at being that big. Some buttons are taller than others, for no
reason. MP3 Folder navigation is backwards (the button on the top moves you down,
the button on the bottom moves you up), and it's missing some key features
that would be awsome to have (full CD random, song preview). It was a
decision for me between this one and the Sony CDX-MP450x and the
Sony didn't read ID3 tags (the embedded information in an MP3 that gives you
the full song name, artist, track, album, genre, etc. I simply can't survive
seeing a song come up as "BLUERO~1", "BLUERO~2", etc. I'd much rather see
"Blue Rodeo - Five Days in May" ya know? The Sony had better UI I think, but
in this case the features of the Kenwood won out (a as a bonus, it was cheaper
too).
Reason #54362 not to trust Future Shop employees: When asking them about the
two decks and in particular about the fact the Sony didn't seem to be showing
the full song name (I hadn't researched it at the time to know that it
couldn't) he said "oh yea, it does normally for me, sure it does" put in a CD
(normal CD, not a MP3 CD) and it did (I guess it can read embedded
information off a music CD or something). When asked (again) "ok, so it works
for music CDs, what about MP3 CDs?" I was told "oh of course it does, I just
don't remember how to turn that setting on" (or some such bullshit).
<pause for another pitcher>
I'd venture heading to bed now (gads, 3am!) but it seems as soon as I lie down
my stomach hurts again. I'll check my mail real quick and then see how it
goes. Hopefully I'll drift of to dreamin' till morn.
Microsoft released their iPod competitor the 
