So this morning I discovered I have a cold. I hate colds. I don’t know what is up, but this is the third cold in as many months. I hate taking cold medicine, mostly because it makes me feel even worse than the cold itself. Taking a drug to ease an infection just seems like it’s making my body work twice as hard, once for the cold and once to get rid of the drugs. So for now I remain mucus boy, double-fisting huge glasses of water. Ugh. I just hope I didn’t give it to anybody I was with this weekend. The bad feelings of a cold are far outweighed by the knowledge that someone else is ill because of me.
To distract myself from my health woes I bought an Apple iPod nano this afternoon. Ostensibly it’s a device that will assist me with my work. I can boot PCs and servers from it, though I only tried it using the HP USB Disk Format utility. I haven’t tried Linux on it, but I do know that its iPod-ness gets very messed up when you format it. If you do this learn to like the hard reset (hold down select & up simultaneously). It also seems as if the base firmware on the iPod knows that the rest of its OS is at a specific memory location, because copying the iPod folder back to it after using the HP utility doesn’t work very well, either.
I don’t know how SanDisk or any of those other companies can compete against the iPod nano. The iPod is $10 to $20 more than the other flash disk offerings, and you can listen to music on it. The 2 GB SanDisk MicroCruzer is tiny, too, and prone to me losing it. My old 1 GB SanDisk Cruzer, which was a trooper and had been through the washer & dryer three times successfully before the fourth fateful trip, was small enough that I lost that all the time. It’s 2 GB successor is half its size again, and would be an instant waste of $200. At least the iPod has some decent size to it. I can deal with thin devices, it’s just microscopic ones that drive me nuts.
Maybe I’ll try some nighttime cold medication anyhow…