Author Archives: Ryan Markel

“You can’t build a reputation on what you’re going to do.”

–Henry Ford

“My work is a game, a very serious game.”
–M.C. Escher

It’s iPod, Except with More… Touching… in a Good Way…

I’m now the proud owner of one 16-gigabyte iPod touch, and after a good half-day of messing with it and playing to try and figure the thing out, I have to say that I’m coming away from the first experiences very, very impressed. I find that music library management is going to be difficult for me, at least at first, as I’ve just now filled up my 40-gig fourth generation iPod, and Smart Playlists have become much more important for both iPods. I may have to pick up a 160-gig iPod classic at some point to continue to have at least one device that contains my entire music collection.

In any case, I wanted to jot down some of my thoughts for those who read, so if you’re thinking about picking one up, or you have questions about it, I figure more of those will be handled by what I have to say. You can already see some of my commentary in my tweets from earlier this evening, while I was messing around with it.

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“Always acknowledge a fault. This will throw those in authority off their guard and give you an opportunity to commit more.”
Mark Twain

It Never Feels Much Different, Except for the Whole Time Passing More Quickly Thing

Yes, only a few short hours ago, I officially turned twenty-eight years of age. Thanks to all the people who left messages and/or e-mails for me or threw something up on my Facebook wall, or similar actions.

A whole lot has happened in recent memory, and it’s only now that things seem to be calming down to the point where I can take my time and make decisions without needing to worry that a situation is going to change drastically or circumstances will be altered enough for me to worry about it.

You’ll notice that with my birthday, I’ve altered the theme used here for a while. There’s no banner at the moment (I haven’t installed anything I can use to work with images yet on my new computer), but I hope to have that up and working sometime tomorrow. This will be my new launching point for a redesigned look and an attempt at something different. I have a “plan b” in place as well, so don’t be surprised if the final effort looks very dissimilar. Most of what will happen is a question of how far I can successfully stretch my CSS editing skills.

This post isn’t really for catching up or anything of the sort – more like checking in. The combination of the new year and my birthday lend themselves quite nicely to trying out new habits, one of which is more frequent posting here (more than just funneled tweets from Twitter).

I’m also working on a nifty little project for those of you who are Lutheran Service Book users, one which I think you’ll enjoy and (hopefully) use to the fullest. I’ll have more to post on that sometime this week.