Birthday toys
Nov.29, 2006, filed under Miscellany
So. It was my birthday on Sunday. I am now ancient and haggly.
Munky came to visit, all the way from deepest, darkest Devon., to offer tips on triathlon training, go cycling and swimming, thrash us mercilessly in Buzz and rescue a seal.
Yes, I did say “rescue a seal”. More on RB, Munky and the Trapped Morris later. There are photos. And video. Although you’ll have to wait even longer for the video.
Munky brought me a binary explosive (AKA two miniatures of sloe gin, yummy), a Stewie keyring (“Oh to be the Lindberg baby right about now!”) and elastic laces for my tri shoes, which are fab and I will be trying them later.
Frood and I split the cost of a Sony NW-S205F. Excuse me while I go all geeky for a moment.
Oh. My. Gods. This thing has a 2GB memory in a flash memory stick that weighs the same as the fluff on a hairy caterpillar and is slightly larger than the remote unit for the Sony minidisc I was using. It is a shiny sexy silver and it fits underneath my On-One jacket. It is water resistant and shock resistant. So far all of this is enough to make me wet my pants, given that my kit is generally used for tough sporty activities and I get fed up with having to make sure it stays dry and coddled (even so both minidiscs are starting to give up the ghost).
But then you look at the features. Features!
In SPORTS MODE you can play songs using the automatic selection function in which the player changes the playlist automatically depending on your pace of movement, like walking or jogging.
Now I thought that the three-shake shuffle play feature (bored? Just shake the player three times and it reverts to shuffle play!) was cool. But a player that can select playlist by BPM depending on how fast you’re running? Dear gods. I shall have to make sure I put the rest of Space Tribe and the Crystal Method on there.
Oh. OK. No. It just detects whether you’re walking or running and you need to tell it which playlists are for walking or running. But even so, a nice short chillout playlist for the cool-down or just strolling along the beach. How groovy!
And if all the music playback, stopwatch and other miscellaneous things weren’t enough, you tell it your height and weight (which it reassuringly tells me in the operations manual does not get sent to the computer by the USB connection) from which it calculates your stride length and then gives you an idea of calories burned and distance travelled. I shall be comparing these to known numbers later.
My only niggle with it so far is that the buttons are very small and fiddly to use wearing full-fingered gloves and the sound quality isn’t too great in the headphones, which is an issue with the headphones not the player.
So that was fab.
Thanks to all those who sent birthday wishes. I’ve been concentrating on having a bit of a chilled time over the past few days, which I desperately, desperately needed. Those of you who know what has been happening will understand. The rest will just have to take my word for it.
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Singularity
~something that is singular as (a) a separate unit, or (b) unusual or distinctive manner or behavior; PECULIARITY;
~the quality or state of being singular;
~a point at which the derivative of a given function of a complex variable does not exist but every neighborhood of which contains points for which the derivative exists;
~a point or region of infinite mass density at which space and time are infinitely distorted by gravitational forces and which is held to be the final state of matter falling into a black hole. Sight
