Apple hooked me in Minnesota

I'm in Saint Paul, Minnesota, this week for a course in Solaris 10. Class has been very interesting. I've been learning about Zones, DTrace, and Web-based Jumpstarts; all very exciting and useful stuff. It looks like DTrace will be a great replacement for my previous uses of the truss command. And web-based jumpstarts will surely replace our existing TFTP/NFS/RARP-based jumpstarts for our South Dakota data center.

In the off hours, I've been taking advantage of my hotel's luxurious accommodations. I went geocaching, caught "Munich" at a local cinema, and browsed a local shopping mall. In this local shopping mall there happened to be an Apple store. It was full of shiny, new iPods, and I took one home.

During the day, we take a ten minute break every hour or so. Classmate Mitch, sitting next to me, kept playing with his iPod and singing its praises during these breaks. Apparently, there is now an FM tuner available for the iPod. The previous lack of this feature and the cost of the iPod were the big drawbacks that kept me from buying. The fact that it syncs with iTunes, has an optional tuner, and downloads podcasts automatically were the features that made me buy.

This wouldn't even be worthy of noting, except that the iPod is so frickin' expensive. Remember when Walkman tape players were $80 and that was a really nice one? Ha. The iPod 30GB model is $300. That said, it is a nice product from which I will get a lot of use.

Yes, yes... I have too many gadgets. Laugh all you want.