Sorry it’s been so long between posts.  I’ve been very busy with a lot of things lately, so here’s what I’ve been up to:  iPod.  I picked up an iPod recently, on the recommendation of a few friends, and I can’t put the darned thing down! I had no idea it could be so addictive–as so accessorizable–if that’s even a word… You can get pretty much any accessory for it imaginable, from simple docks you just drop it into to full-blown high-end stereo systems it integrates into!  No, I didn’t go THAT far, but I did pick up a couple inexpensive “cube-like” clock/radios with iPod docks on them–one for home and one for my desk at work.  It just makes it so simple–just drop it into the slot and it plays all my music, my movies, my photos… I just saw a really cool dock at Sam’s Club today that I am considering now.  It looks just like a portable DVD player with a 7″ LCD display, except it has an iPod-sized cutout in the lower half…just drop the iPod in and you have a portable media player with a decent-sized 7″ display!  I might just have to pick that one up.  And get this–just for the heck of it I decided to see if it could handle syncing my entire collection of Digital Camera images–over 30,000 photos and growing.  It took several hours, but it worked just fine! I was amazed.  They’re compressed of course–it automatically reduces them to a comfortable iPod-compatible size–but they still look really decent when I run them as a slideshow with the iPod connected to our 1080p television!

Besides all the iPodding lately, a lot more of my spare time has also been eaten up by the handling my dad’s estate.  I was officially appointed the Personal Representative last week, so I’m the lucky one that gets to handle every aspect of finalizing all the details, selling assets, and wrapping things up completely.  At least there’s a lawyer involved to keep everything striaght and on-track.  I can use him when needed, but not without a price of course, so I’m doing as much of it as I can without his assistance, due to our very limited funds.  This week I put an ad in the paper to sell my dad’s van, and we’re actually getting a lot of calls about it, so hopefully that part of it will come to a close very soon.

Lastly, I have been having a lot of pain in my left knee over the past few months. Apparently it is the long-term effects of falling on a patch of ice in front of our house in the middle of last winter. I felt better a few weeks after the fall, so I assumed it would be ok.  It was a little sore over the months since, but lately it has become much more painful, and walking up or down stairs in almost impossible.  I had an MRI done a couple weeks ago, and they found a tear in the center of my knee.  I’m going to see a specialist on Monday to see what has to be done next.

That’s about it I think.  Oh, except for an excellent Audiobook I’m almost finished listening to (reading?) right now–yes, as I type this.  It’s called “The Last Lecture” by Randy Pausch.  It was mentioned by Leo on the TWiT podcast recently.  It about a Virtual Reality professor at Carnegy-Mellon.  He found out he had cancer and only a few months to live, so he gave his last lecture.  The lecture itself is all over YouTube, you should definitely check it out.  The book isn’t the actual lecture, but more like his entire life story, up to and including everything about the lecture.  Randy Pausch just passed away a couple weeks ago.  Very sad story, but awesome reading and there’s a lot you can learn from him.  Take a look:

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