Various

Having pondered the advice of my extensive readership, I have bought myself an MP3 player. I found out that Creative Labs has a factory store on eBay, and there I found myself a factory re-conditioned MuVo Slim for $60.00 including postage. There was a brief kerfluffle because the unit appeared not to work, until Hal got onto the Creative Labs knowledgebase and discovered that the MuVo insists on being assigned drive letter "F", and that letter had already been assigned on my machine. Once Hal shuffled drive assignments, the unit has been working up to spec and I am a happy bunny. It's about the size of a credit card, and not much thicker, so it's very easy to drop in a pocket for portage. It only holds 512mb of data, but that seems to be plenty for my purposes, and it has an FM radio included, which was a large part of the attraction. Now I can listen to NPR on the bus, if I want. The other attraction was of course the price. I didn't really want to spend hundreds of dollars on my first player, since I don't actually know yet how much I will use it. If it turns out to be the best thing since water-cooler bottles with built-in handles, well, I can get the 93 terabyte model next time. As predicted, the controls and the software are transparent, and easy, and don't make me batshit crazy, which I suspect an iPod's would have. Also, the battery is user replaceable, which apparently the iPod's isn't. And it absolutely would have driven me batshit crazy to have to send my player back to the factory to get its battery replaced. So that's a bullet dodged.

And in other old topics, it seems to me that rasff is remarkably politics-reduced and readable, lately. What's up with that?