Are you ready to rock, Hello Kitty?  It certainly looks like she is.  I am ready to rock as well.  \m/ \m/  I just have to learn to play.  I've had the acoustic you see there behind the new Hello Kitty for ten years or so and I've never learned.  I started to try recently but I'm a wuss and my fingers hurt.  *single tear*  My co-worker (and bass player in a rock juggernaut) Josh recommended an electric because you don't have to press on the strings quite as hard.  As cheesy as a Hello Kitty guitar is, the reviews (by people who actually play) were all really good and it was only $169.  Not too shabby.  Now, seriously, I just have to learn to play.

W00t, w00t!  I finally bit the bullet and bought a new computer.  My old desktop at home died.  *sniff*  I'd been using my work laptop for the past several months, which isn't exactly optimal.  I'm not going to illegally download music on a work computer.  Heh.

I kept going back and forth between a new desktop and a new laptop.  Should I switch to Macs?  Decisions, decisions.  After a little bit of thought and the realisation that I didn't want to spend a ton of money, I decided on the little Dell Inspiron Mini 9.

Look how cute it is!  It's 2.3 pounds, smaller than a hardback book (look at the photo of it sitting on the book I'm reading), and is perfectly sufficient for doing what most of us do at home - being on the intewebs. 

I got the fancy-pants model, which starts at $489 and has Windows XP, a 16GB solid state hard drive, 1GB2 DDR2 at 533MHz (I cut and pasted that and only sort of know what it means), and a 4 cell battery.  I upgraded to the 1.3M pixel built-in webcam and added the Bluetooth capacity, and got it in white (which at the time cost an extra $25, though they seem to have dropped the additional fee for that as of now).  There was a $40 discount for purchasing and free shipping, so it cost me $551, shipped.  Not too shabby.

Now, the keyboard is tiny, as it's going to have to be on a 8.9" laptop, and they moved the apostrophe down by the spacebar, which is annoying, but it's working pretty well.  I am having some issues with the cursor bouncing all over the screen and the resolution needs to be changed every time I restart the machine, both of which is annoying.  It also comes with a bunch of junk pre-installed and set to load when Windows loads, so all that needed to be cleaned out, but that's always a problem when you buy a comptuter from somewhere like Dell.

So, all in all, I'm happy.  If nothing else, it is pretty cute.  Heh.

Vinyl records.  Remember those?  Some of you do, I imagine.  Others don't but might be music nerds who still buy records when you can find them.  (Request of the Anti- record label - Please release Joe Henry's and The Frames' albums on vinyl as well as CDs!)  Anyway, so, records.  Yes.  All my life I've had a record player.  The family had the ol' hi-fi when I was young and I had my little Fisher-Price plastic turntable.  You know, the brown case with the orange insides?  Exactly.  When I was seven or eight I finally got a proper stereo thingie of my own.  Sad as it may seem, I've been using that for the past twenty years.  It had a dual cassette deck and a turntable up top.  I got a CD player years later when CDs replaced tapes and I've been rockin' on that ever since.  Now, I've been meaning to replace it for years - Get a proper receiver, new turntable, etc.  However, as time went on, I realised I really only listen to my iPod and vinyl.  So, sad as I am to replace my old stereo (despite it being...well, crap (sentimental value, you know)), I decided to pick up a new turntable and a new iPod dock for my bedroom. 

I looked around.  I considered a couple different USB turntables but realised I didn't want to convert my records to MP3s, I just wanted to listen to them.  I considered some pricey, fancy-pants turntables, but realised I didn't want to go that route either.  Then I started looking at the Crosleys.  They look super-swanky and ye olde tyme and the reviews were pretty good.  I thought about getting the single player, since it was a fair bit cheaper, but this Stack-o-Matic version was the one I decided on.  It can stack up to six records and play them (well, once side of each album) in order automatically.  Rock, rock on.

I got it home today (it came this morning and I ran out to the record store at lunch to buy some new records) and I must say, I really like it.  The sound is...OK.  Good enough.  The speakers are on the side of the unit so I'll probably have to turn it sideways when I listen to it from now on, but the sound coming out of the speakers isn't bad.  It's not audiophile quality sound but it's perfectly fine for the average user.  And it looks awesome.  What more can you ask for?  :)