A new toy

Ah, the internets. If these tubes weren’t flowing freely, I don’t know what I’d do. I mean, I watched this German movie over the weekend, and was taken by an Italian song on the soundtrack. Time spent tracking down unknown song with unknown title in unfamiliar language by unknown artist: 2 minutes. If I had wireless access in the office, I would have downloaded it to my Touch, making the whole exercise about 2.5 minutes.

So, yeah, I did buy the iPod Touch. I figure that if my PDA hadn’t died a month or two ago I might have stayed away, but I’ll admit it’s the apps that swung it. I love the idea of watching stuff on the bus on that bright little screen, but throwing in calendars and notes and games and wireless and all manner of stuff on which I’ll waste all manner of money did the trick for me. Of course, the new models are so new they don’t even have form-fitting cases yet, so I’m toting it around in some bizarre case I’ve had for years now that at least does have the virtue of easy in, easy out—the Touch requires hands-on access. This entire adventure necessitated downloading iTunes 8, which so far is running fine, despite Apple’s dreadful history with any release ending in a zero. It did take forever to upgrade the album art of the library, but after that, it’s been peachy. And sitting around in the chez surfing with the Touch is pretty cool. I’ve been sorting through the app store, and only gotten last.fm and Wikipedia and some Sudoku puzzles so far, and I’ve been learning what works well and what doesn’t work on Safari. I do love the whole idea of downloading an album from iTunes and then having it save back to your library when you sync. This is seriously cool, and potentially disastrous financially. The good news is that I can’t automatically access the wireless at the Day Job; the last thing I need is availability of an income drain 24/7.

Anyhow, technology aside, I went into this last weekend thinking I’d accomplish all manner of debate business, and wound up accomplishing absolutely nothing. Tonight I’ll be figuring out how to deal with what I hope is a sea of newbies on Wednesday. They will need a little orientation, but at the same time, we need to get down to business, i.e., the nature of justice. I mean, you’ve got to start somewhere. I need to get some debate rhythm going, with regular meetings during the week and regular tournaments on the weekends, but that won’t be for a while, what with Parents’ Night and the Jewish holidays and the generally weird event schedule this season. Oh, well. We’ll get there one way or the other.