So…I’ve always been a huge fan of whatever happens to be the latest technology, one of my favorite blogs recently has been “engadget” which keeps feeding me up to the minute information on the ever changing world of geekdom. Every so often I’ll fall for the hype and indulge myself in a new toy. Two years ago, way before the iPhone was even announced by Steve Jobs, I had read rumors flying around the internet about a mythological wide-screen, touch based ipod… Not knowing how far off this product would be…and thinking it was just months away I held off on upgrading my broken 2nd Generation ipod for over a year with hopes that I would be watching widescreen videos any day. Last October, giving up hope I decided to cave and buy a used video ipod off of craigslist. When the iPhone was announced a few months later, I knew that my days without a touch-based ipod were numbered. Early this month Apple finally announced the iPod Touch (or phone-less iPhone). It only took a few weeks to round up enough stuff to sell online for me to scrape up some cash so I could run to the closest BestBuy and get my hands on one of these new toys. I’ve got it…and its glorious.

<begin nerdy technology review>

I’m really happy with my PDA-Phone the Treo 700w, but was pretty tempted to jump over to the iPhone as soon as I saw the thing…but I knew deep down that all I really wanted was something more simple. I use my iPods all the time, from the dock in my truck stereo to the dock hooked up to my stereo at home, I enjoy my digital music library and enjoy taking it with me. The first downside to the iPod touch is the lack of storage space. It was hard for me to “downgrade” from an 80gb iPod to something that would hold much less. Apple chose to go with two flash-based sizes when they released the iPod touch, 8gb and 16gb…it uses similar storage technology as the nano does, memory chips, as opposed to small spinning hard disks that the video iPods use. These memory chips are much better on the battery and incredibly smaller than a harddisk. I’m sure over the next few years they’ll be able to catch up with the technology and remove harddrives from the mix altogether. It was a compromise for me…but one I was willing to make.

You’ve been living under a rock if you haven’t heard how amazing the iPhone interface is, and the iPod Touch is exactly the same… very easy and fun to work with. Videos are nice and big on the 3.5″ widescreen… They didn’t take everything from the iPhone and stick it on the iPod though, while we do get WiFi, the ability to browse the internet, and the YouTube application; Apple chose to leave out a handful of features, the calendar is pretty non-functional, there is no Google Maps, and no stock/weather app, and bluetooth isn’t installed. I can understand most of those, I’d want to make the two products different as well, if I had wanted those features I would have bought the phone, not the iPod… I’m still pretty surprised that I can browse the internet with this!

I’ve never been a fan of the scratch magnet that is the shiny iPod back, and while it was dropped on the iphone for a brushed silver, they brought it back for this new version….but its nothing that my “invisible shield” can’t take care of… seriously, I’ve put one of these on every iPod I’ve had and they still amaze me with how effective it is, and I love that it doesn’t add any bulk when carrying the device around.

All in all, I’m very happy with the purchase, and I can’t wait to go on vacation and start watching movies!

Wow, now I know that there are millions of bloggers out there, and that probably only very few of them do a “good” job of updating their site, but almost a year without a substantial entry is pretty ridiculous.

Life has been good down here in Yelm, things at camp are still great and I still feel so blessed to have the job that I do. Summertime and the months leading up to it are insanely busy as we hire almost 80 full time college-aged staff to help our various camp programs and our rental facilities, summer is always the most rewarding part of the job here, and its always sad to see everyone leave… but its kind of nice to be suddenly out in the middle of the woods by ourselves again! (Speaking of camp, our new program intern Claudia is going to be helping to keep our Cascades Blog up to date each week, check it out!)

Everytime I think about coming back here to this blog, I struggle to see its purpose, its been two years since we moved back down here to Washington after our 12 month adventure in Nome, Alaska. The time we spent in Nome was this blog’s hayday, and its hard to imagine anything being as fun for me to write (and maybe more importantly, for you to read) as when we chronicled our great white journey. HOWEVER, I’m just going to do it regardless…we’ll see what happens.

yelm moment of the day:: After turning onto “Bald Hills Rd” Lydia and I noticed that our local feed store had about, oh…400x the normal amount of cars parked in the parking lot. Not only were there cars in the lot, they were parking at a store across the street, and on the side of the road (both sides) for about 150 yards. We had no other option but to pull over and find out for ourselves what on earth could possibly be going on. We parked on the side of the road and started walking up to the store. Once we got to the parking-lot we were greeted by about 250 people crammed into a small area near the entrance to the store, we looked in the middle of the crowd, and there was a temporary pen setup and in the middle was a baby calf sleeping. The sign on the pen told that the calf, and a year of its feed was the grand prize in a customer appreciation giveaway. It mentioned that the winner would be picked Sunday evening at 4:00, and that the winner must be present in order to claim their prize. I looked down at my watch and saw that it was 3:57, we had only a few minutes until the contest would come to a close. Lydia and I ran inside, and with all thoughts of “logistics” aside were going to try and win ourselves some cow. I ran up to the register inside the store and asked for two entry slips and just as I finished writing our phone number on the second slip, the manger was trying to make his way through the crowd with the box of entries in his hand. I pushed my way to him and was one of the last entrants in this bizarre contest. The manager made his way outside and was greeted by a forklift which he stood on, as to get above the crowd. Alas, we did not leave the store that afternoon with a cow, but we did leave with some pride in the crazy hick-ville that we live in.