Be The Pigeon

Well, I've done it. I've taken the plunge to a place from whence I'm surely to never emerge. I just ordered a Blackberry. Because these handheld PDA devices are so addictive, they've been coined Crackberries. In addition to the regular web/mail/IM junk, though, my Crackberry will: be red (very sexy!) have GPS (totally geeky!) have a 2MP camera (totally unnecessary!) tether to my PC so I can be online (either from the device or directly to the PC) anywhere. This will replace my data card I have on my PC now, but will be slower, though a little more useful. (totally mobile!) have a card slot where I can put on 4GB of whatever, including docs, music, etc (totally helpful!) So the next time you see me, don't be surprised if there's a Crackberry on my person! Now I can be a geek anytime, anywhere (as if I needed an excuse). Why, I'll likely even be asked to fix someone's PC using it at some point!

Yes, that's my alter-ego. It's a good thing I know how to fix computers, because I'd have nothing to do with my evenings otherwise! A friend from church called me up several weeks ago with a problem on his college-aged daughter's laptop. It was full of crap. The kind of crap you get from going to sites you shouldn't be on, like the music-pirating sites. Of course, the daughter says that it was her "friend" who did that, and she told her not to... This machine wasn't just full of crap, it was absolutely trashed beyond repair. So I spend hours upon hours on it and manage to salvage the data. Then I get to order recovery CD's since none were available. Wait a few days for the mail to come, reload WinXP, patch the heck out of it, add all the free security and malware tools I can think of, restore the data. Phew, it's fixed and I'm a nice guy! Game over . But then... Game not over. Instead, now it's round two (imagine me on Do

So I got a digital music player (I really like my Sansa e280R player , and it's cheaper and much more versatile than an iPod) for my birthday in October and I've been having fun loading it up with tunes. The trouble is, all the tunes I've had for years aren't exactly organized like one would expect of someone as anal as me. The tags (the info on artist, album, genre, etc.) are all messed up. I have no idea how it happened, but many of them have really wacky genres (apparently it isn't good enough to have only like 5-10 genres in the great Internet DB of music; there are more like 100+). So I have country tunes with "Blues" and so on. Thus I found myself spending time fixing many of them (which I'm only too sure I've done previously only to have them messed up again). Then I got to working with my ratings (you know, the little stars that accompany each track). Though I'm sure I've fixed them before, too, many are goofed up. (RealPlaye

So now that my wife has joined the club, I couldn't be left behind. Too much pride at stake. And yet when I consider what pivotal topics might be in need of my of-so-plentiful opinions, nothing quite comes. Jolayne has already captured the "about our kids" market, and surely I cannot compete there without facing serious repercussions (infer as you wish), and so I'll continue to ponder. I have a couple ideas to prime the pump. Give me a little time to get them written up.