I fly out to Korea tomorrow morning. So as in all situations involving the "days before" a long trip, things have been rather hectic.

Deciding that spending hours on the subway systems of Seoul as well as the long flight there without music just could NOT do, I ended up buying an iPod. After getting some comments regarding minis vs. iPods, I decided to spring the extra $50 and pick up the 15GB iPod. I love the feel of it and I love the software.

The only problem is that all my music is on my craptop. And I don't have any real easy method of getting in to the parents' desktop to move music onto the iPod (I can't get iTunes on here because I have Win98). So besides the fact that I spent about 10+ hours so far relabelling all ID3v1 tags for all my MP3s ... I also had to transfer them to my desktop using ONE 256MB USB diskkey.

So far, I've moved about 1.5 gigs worth of stuff onto the desktop. Luckily the last time I left for Korea (2 years ago) I backed up all my MP3s then, so I only have to backup the last two years' worth of MP3s...

But relabelling ID3v1 tags for all 8 gigs worth of MP3s is a big bitch. Funny story: In the beginning, I was determined to weigh each song's genre perfectly. BY GOD, I WAS GOING TO HAVE THE BEST ORGANIZED IPOD EVER! Sadly, after about the 6th hour, I gave up being really precise. It's ok to use the "Other" category ;)

The only issue I've had with the iPod so far is that it's not a very useful "travel" player. In my mind, a useful "travel" player should have some sort of distinguishing physical characteristics on it so I can change songs and the volume without having to actually look at it. I don't want to be walking in the mall, then have to stop to change the song cause I don't like the song. The advantage to my CD and Minidisc player is their physical buttons help me work them without having to look at them. With the iPod's flat surface, I can't really "feel" around to do something since... well... that would set things off.

But besides that, this thing has been a joy to have. Since getting that (and actually since backing up all my webdesign/photography files onto CD-R FINALLY using the disk key), I have like more than a gig worth of free hard drive space.

It feels so awesome.

Now, I was going to start doing some limited beta testing for the new CP while I was in the air ... but after making the semi-impulsive iPod and wasting last night moving my MP3s to the iPod, I really didn't have time to finish things up. So I decided that if I'm going to delay this CP even further, I might as well do things completely right... so I bought some reading material for the plane... I have the (serious) goal of mastering DOMs so that I can start doing more advanced things within the Tabulas CP.

I've convinced myself (I'm quite good at this self-deception thing) that in order to build a truly powerful GUI for Tabulas, I need to master the client-side tools. People should be able to add in categories and usericons from the entry addition page without having to reload the entry page. Etc. etc. When you attach an image to an entry, I shouldn't be using nasty hacks with iframes to accomplish it... DAMNIT ROY USE DOM!!!

I also bought "Guns, Germs and Steel" ... I've heard far too many good things about it not to read it. Plus I'm a sucker for history (I watch far too much History Channel for my own good).

Yeah, so I just blew like half my money on useless things... but it's been a while since I've splurged, and honestly I needed some sort of distraction away from all this web work =).

Now I think I'll go pass out and wake up and then work some more on Tabulas 8).