Light Hearted Fun
Laughs for the truely sick... Sinfest. Found through Big Panda a 'tips-for-comics' site. You can tip the comics through PayPal. I'm concidering getting an account. And thanks to Doc Searls for passing me on to BP.

Powderfinger Collectors hell
A quick search of Ebay just discovered a few horrors. There are people out there happy to pay $41 for Powderfinger's "Save Your Skin" single. Others are happy to pay $50 for the four singles from Internationalist. I'm sorry but this is just wrong. I bought all my singles for less than $20, most of them for under $12. I'm still desperately looking for Powderfinger's 'Blue EP'. Now that is truely rare with only about 1500 made.

I always thought that MP3/Napster would reduce the demand for this sort of thing. If you could get the B-side from the net why pay stupid amounts of money for it? But I've found rare stuff to be just as hard to find on Napster as in real life. Most people only have band's singles available. Boring.

Flu
I have the flu. Plain old boring flu. I don't remember ever feeling like this, and hence can only conclude I've never had the flu before. All those times I suspected it, I only had a cold. Common cold. Lame. The flu is nothing like a cold. All my muscles hurt, my brain is all over the place and my chest hurts.

Trash Your Hotel with Magic Dirt
I'm told by Heath that their new album rules. Who cares, go trash your hotel.

Portable MP3 CD players
It's obvious why Sony hasn't come out with a Discman that plays MP3 CDrs. There 'next big thing' is the Memory Stick and they don't want to show just how pathetic a 64Meg $200+ Memory Stick looks next to $5 of 700Meg of CD-RW.

But why not the other big players like Panasonic? It's obviously the next big thing... although its also obvious is a thing that won't last very long. Maybe a year.. maybe two.

The two players I've tested havn't met my expectactions. One didn't play high enough quality MP3s, only up to 196kbps (but it's antiskip was awesome). The other's antiskip was pretty bad and was completely unusable in the car (but it played up to 320kbps with no errors and included an ID3 tag digital display).

Maybe the quality/$ margin is to low? Maybe they know the market just won't be there long enough to bother? But with DVD players these days being able to play MP3 CDrs... surely it'll just be a dodgy little gimic extra to play MP3s in Discmans soon enough?

DVD Players
I'm getting one very soon. It plays DVDs, VCDs, MP3s and every other three letter acronym you can think of involving audio or video on bits of round plastic. It also plays all zones. Apparently it will also get around the new DVDs which apparently don't work on multizone players. These are all good things.

I recently went into an electronics shop and followed the advice of a Slashdot post. I said I was looking to buy a DVD player and listened to the long blah from the salesperson. I then finally asked if it was multizone. They ummed and said 'no'. 'Are any of the players here multizone?'... 'No' and I walked out. Nice feeling.

JB-HiFi sells multizone players. Lots of places do. I couldn't find anywhere on the web stating if multizone players were illegal or not but a lot of places don't like to advertise the fact... strange.

I look forward to getting 'Transformers the Movie' on DVD.