Wednesday, August 24, 2005

Adventures in New Technology

In honor of the fact that I will soon be gainfully employed, we ordered some new gadgets, which arrived yesterday. For Jeff, we got a laptop computer, and for me, an iPod. The laptop is an Apple PowerBook, and it is totally awesome. The iPod is pretty cool too. I am particularly excited about the iPod because I love music; plus, it can be used as storage for all my data from my research.

Until I got the iPod, I'd never owned a personal music-playing device. Growing up, I never had a walkman or a diskman or anything like that. Yesterday I charged it up and loaded my entire music library on it. This morning I used it as I walked to the bus stop. It was a lot of fun to listen to music as I walked. It was kind of like having my own personal soundtrack. (Don't worry, I didn't turn it up so high that I was unaware of my surroundings.)

Something interesting that I noticed was how loud it is on the bus. I set the music volume for a comfortable level for walking, but when I got inside the bus, I couldn't hear the music anymore. And it wasn't because anybody was talking; it was because the engine of the bus was really loud.

The laptop is great. I love Macs. They are just the right mix of graphical user interface and hackability. OS X is built on top of unix, so you can open up a terminal shell and hack away to your heart's content.

1 comment:

Susie said...

i love iPods too! congrats - you'll enjoy it. i've finding myself downloading books and music for car trips too - so fun!