30 Years After the Fair

• Nik’s car got broken into last night and they ripped out her new stereo that I just got her for her birthday back in October. This, you may recall, is the second break-in at our apartment complex in about a year and is the third car-related theft (including the swiping of the entire vehicle last summer) in the same time frame. It’s getting really old and while part of the fault lies with us (we’re not always the most diligent about keeping our cars free of enticing bait), it annoys me that car crimes are at the absolute top of the list of incidents in our otherwise pretty safe little community and yet the police seem generally uninterested in doing much about it such as increasing street presence.
• We also lost both of our iPods which were stashed in the center console where the adapter for the stereo interface runs, and annoyingly our insurance is threatening to cancel our renter’s policy as a liability if we file a claim. Which makes me wonder, if they’re going to do this the first time we file a claim, what’s the point of having it again?
• By the way, for those keeping score, that makes all three iPods that we’ve owned, stolen. Someone must sure like our taste in music.
• In a strange twist of fate, the same day Nikki’s Sirius-capable stereo was stolen, her birthday gift to me arrived via UPS. It is a Stiletto portable satellite receiver and it’s really slick. It has built-in WiFi so you can connect to Sirius’ internet feed when you’re indoors (the satellite signal doesn’t work too well when the antenna isn’t outdoors) and it has a 2GB storage feature and TiVo-esque recording/scheduling function so you can load MP3s on it or queue up radio content to listen to later. Which should work great for Sharks games since Sirius gets all the NHL feeds.
• The only problem with the Stiletto (okay, two problems) is that the portable antenna is integrated with the special headphones and they’re a it bulky and dorky-looking. Not that I really care, especially since I’ll probably be using it mostly in the car, but it is kind of funny. Also the software for loading music files is Windows-only so I have to fire up Virtual PC which is just dog slow on my aging iBook. Fortunately I prefer iPods for digital music anyway (stop laughing, it ain’t funny) so it doesn’t really matter it’s just kind of a hassle.
• So Apple announced the incessantly-rumored iPhone today. As much as I usually like what Apple does, I’m pretty underwhelmed by this one. I’m sure it’s a very nice phone but what about some scoop on Leopard? Nothing? Anyone? Is this thing on?
• Meanwhile, TiVo finally, finally announced that they finished TiVo2Go for Macs. Hoorays and street-dancing all around, right? Well, no. See, here’s a snippet from the announcement in TiVo’s newsletter:

  We’ve partnered with Roxio to enable TiVoToGo in Toast 8 Titanium, available TODAY! Yes, you can now transfer your favorite TiVo recordings to your Mac, watch them in a player, burn them to DVD, and convert them for playback on iPod or PSP. […] And yes, Toast is the standard for disc burning software on the Mac. The new version 8 is truly awesome.

  Standard for disc burning? O RLY? That’s so funny because OS X Tiger supports system-wide disc burning on the OS level. I’d say that’s pretty durn standard. So in order to get the same functionality as a Windows PC I have to spend at least $40 for software that does something the system does natively? Unless I’m missing something I’m gonna have to say thanks, but no.
• Nik and I continue to discuss the possibility of moving closer to my work, but after looking at some affordable places in the area we were pretty underwhelmed. Also I forgot just how stupidly expensive moving is so we’re still kicking the idea around, we’re just not sure if it is still going to happen or when. At this point, we’re taking a sort of wait and see approach and keeping our eyes open. The commute isn’t all that bad when I don’t hit any traffic (which I don’t, typically, for this shift) but I wouldn’t mind finding a better use for those hours than driving and burning through my paycheck gas.

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