Slow Friday at work, so I have time between the simulations I'm running for additional posts. No need to thank me, loyal readers!
I finally added a link to Jenny's long-running blog! I'm sure she'll be thrilled. But she's been doing this blogging stuff for years, so it's no big deal to her. I only recently discovered this facet of the Internets, so it's still new and exciting for me.
I think the plan is for us to see Sin City tonight or maybe tomorrow night. Naturally, a review with follow. This evening at 6:30 I have a live fantasy baseball draft for a league I just joined a few hours ago. I've never been as unprepared for fantasy baseball, I've done no research whatsoever! It should be fun, but I'm not expecting that this casual approach to the draft will extend my 2-year league winning streak. Ah well, all good things must come to an end. And I'm sure I'll still draft better than my hometown Orioles!
Right now I have my ipod mini sitting in my desk drawer running through its songs. Or rather, I'm seeing how long it will run through said songs - I'm doing an un-scientific battery-life test, for what it's worth. There are a number of potential problems with this test, the first being that the battery has only been 100% charged once. I'm not sure if it's true, but I've read that the battery needs 3-4 charges to be 'broken-in'. The second issue is that the mp3s that are loaded onto it were encoded using a number of different settings and bit rates, few of which are what I'm currently using to rip-and-encode my CDs. I'm using the LAME mp3 encoder at alt-preset-standard settings, which produces a VBR (variable bit rate) file with an average bit rate of around 200kbps. It's certainly more quality than I need when listening to songs through headphones, so I suspect I'm being a bit of a audiophile snob. But I swear I can hear the difference on certain CDs, especially jazz recordings and electronic music. Who knows, maybe there's a placebo effect at work there. But when every yuppified home has a media receiver that will wirelessly access all mp3s, video files, and photos from home computers, I figure it will be nice to be able to pump high-quality mp3s from my home stereo (which has great-sounding speakers). The downside is that bigger mp3 files - and VBR files to boot - will drain mp3 player batteries quicker than smaller, lower-quality files encoded at constant bit rates.
So time will tell (literally!) whether my current test will yield battery life close to Apple's 18 hour claim. Then for part II of testing I'll see what kind of a hit the battery takes playing my newly-encoded audiophile-snob files. Currently, the battery indicator looks to be at about 60% and I'm at 5 hours of play time. I will provide updates on the test later in the day. Hopefully, much later.
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