World Party "They're Me Favorite Baaaahnd!"

I just spent 1,000,000 hours trying to de-brick my wife's $60 Sansa c240 MP3 player. Which I eventually figured out after trying the most basic fix possible that I found buried deep on some user forum on www.anythingbutipod.com. Basically, disabling the multiple versions of the USB 2.0 driver that the operating system was running. It fixed in an instant. So basically if you take my salary level and then divide it by the number of hours I spent effing around with the Sansa, as a electronics support technician I'm earning about as much as a Bangladeshi street vendor. Which is okay; in the end, the job was done.

I haven't really used any other player than the iPod before, and now that I've figured out that this thing is really only $60, and has an FM radio, and can take a microSD card, and acts as a voice recorder if you want to record your thoughts, script ideas or bitter blog posts. I'm starting to think that the whole iPod thing might actually be a big waste of money. Hey, hey E.A.S.Y. Depends on what you want an MP3 player to do. For one thing, I'm usually only listening to a few of albums at any one time (mostly recent purchases) and the FM thing is pretty cool (and you don't have to blow all your dough on a Zune). I know, I know, video blah blah postage stamp size blah blah iTunes blah digital rights nightmare blah blah design who cares blah blah if you lose a Sansa at the gym. Oh, and it weighs about a half an ounce. Anyway, it seems like a good alternative to a more expensive iPod, if you just want some tunes to take to the gym. Really, this review is probably just because I'm just so thrilled to have fixed the effing thing.

Oh, and the best hour, the one that followed the first 999,9999 was hunting for a CD to load into Windows Media so I could make sure the Sync function on the Sansa was actually working, was spent listening to 'Goodbye Jumbo' by World Party, which I found stuck in a bookshelf behind the sofa table. Which Caroline and I were just discussing as one of our favorite albums of all time. I could listen to it a 1,000,000 times, fixing people's little electronic problems.

It also reminds me of an English lad who worked at Zeus Gallery Cafe in Richmond, Virginia with me back in 1990 or '91. My cousin's husband, Andy, put the disk on the restaurant CD carousel, and hearing the first few opening bars, he looked up and exclaimed, "WORLD PARTY! They're me favorite BAHHHHHND in a thick English accent." One of those moments in life that you never seem to forget.

Put the Message in the Box is a genius tune.

New Google App

Apparently lets people use a surface computing technology to Perez Hilton my, and my colleauge Sarah's faces. Thanks to Miguel Caballero, as well as Google Creative Sandbox 2008. We were able to snap photos and then email directly to an interactive board that let users play with photos, video and other content on a wall using an infra-red technology. Pretty wild; very Minority Report.