Gadget related ranting.

So, I had to put together a three-page paper on “Letter from Birmingham Jail”, due tomorrow, and hadn’t actually done any work on it.

Which is to say, I had a page written on “I Have a Dream”, but it wasn’t going anywhere, so I scrapped it and started over with “Letter”

And since it’s due tomorrow, I turned off my desktop machine, which is full of distractions, and booted up my School Laptop, which does NOT have distractions on it.

And I wanted music, so I had my shiny new iPod sitting on the desk in front of me and I was trying to listen to it with the earbuds, which wasn’t working well because the cord’s really too short to sit back from.  My Grado headphones don’t actually fit in the iPod with its case on, so I can’t use them with it.

Then, I realized that, when buying the Apple Universal Dock, I had bought something that fit my iPod and had a Line Out jack, and I could run that, through a switchbox, into my normal PC speakers – Logitech X-540s, if you care – and then plug the Grados into the speaker pod and listen to them through that while controlling the whole mess with the remote control that came with the dock.

It was a total convergence-gasm.

Then I finished my paper, printed it, shut down the laptop, booted my desktop, and the iPod stopped playing and the remote control stopped working.

It turns out that, if I want to have the computer on, yet be using the iPod, docked, to play music, I need to eject it through iTunes and THEN I can use the remote control, which is dumb.

Also:

One of the things I got for Christmas was a Kingston DataTraveler 16GB flash drive, which is just stunningly tiny for something that holds that much data.

It’s turning out to be TOO tiny.  Too tiny as in, I think I probably left it at work, but if I didn’t leave it at work and DID bring it home, it’s sitting somewhere, USB plug retracted, being an unassuming 1.5″ by .5″ piece of black plastic in an apartment FULL of black surfaces.

This is, approximately, the third time in the last month that I’ve lost the thing.  I need to figure out some way to make it stand out a little more.

Also: Christ, could I have any more company-and-product names in one freaking post?