GPS System Comparison

Now it's time for me to make a little comparison of my christmas present to myself: A GPS system! They're a lot more affordable now than when they first came out, and i'm certainly making more money than that time as well. Steve gave me some advice: go for one with good points of interest, and the extra $100 is worth having the system read street names to you.

Soooo...black friday is in two days and I've found the following deals:


Mio DigiWalker C230 GPS Navigation
$99.99

It's the cheapest GPS to come with street names. It also reroutes well, has good points of interest, and lists the shortest/fastest/etc. routes
It doesn't have Cadanadian maps and the screen is a lot smaller than all the others.


TomTom ONE LE GPS
$119.99

The points of interest aren't very broad.
It has Canadian maps and it will base your trip and the shortest time/distance/etc.


Magellan Roadmate 1200 Portable GPS
$124.99

It doesn't speak the street names, but the maps are very detailed


Garmin Nuvi 200 GPS
$169.99

There are no street names announced and it doesn't have Canadian maps (on my road trip to Vancouver this could be a problem)
But it's easy to install, it has extensive points of interest, and it will re route if you change your direction


Garmin StreetPilot c340 GPS Navigation
$199.99

This will announce the street names and also has a map of Canada. Garmin has great points of interest and you can chose different routes and name them.
Apparenlty it has a 4 hour battery life, but I have no idea if that's average or not.



Of course price is important, but with such an investment I want to make sure I have lots of points, a Canadian map, and rerouting.
My first choice is the Garmin c 340, then Mio, then TomTom, then Garmin Nuvi 200, then Magellan.

I'm only mapping this out because I'll have about 2 minutes to grab one while running into Circuit City dressed like a turkey on Friday. Next, check out presents for my family!

Recording: Check

I finally got through my recording yesterday! I didn't need to stress out as much as I did, I had ample time to prepare everything and get together with my accompanist. I'd never been inside a recording studio and the sound was so crisp and good. The mic was so powerful and close, you can hear every click of my keys and every breath i take. That's a bit of a problem-but oh well.
I started with the Marcello and took awhile correcting everything I wanted to on the 2nd movement. It turned out beautifully though. I did the 3rd movement next and was just not on with my toungeing and fingering, but oh well. The first movement went smoothly. I moved onto the Saint-Seans but my chops were almost shot at this point, so I didn't do too much correcting. The third movement went better than I thought it would, but the first wasn't the best. We ended with the Italian Dance and finally got it up to a tempo I was satisfied with. I hit all my runs which is great! I did my excerpts after that, and it was so easy to hear how my tone and pitch sounded. They went well.
I sat in the editing room and listened and watched how he did things. It was interesting, but seemed very tedious! I won't be able to go back until Monday, but I'm very excited! And finally relieved

mp3 playas

i HATE ipods. Can't stand them. My dislike first developed out of the fact that every hipster kid in the world thinks they need one to be cool. It annoys me because a)it makes them the biggest victim of marketing and complete commercialization and b)they are completely snobby about looking at any other mp3 player and very quick to say everything else sucks. It then blossomed into me hating ipods and ipod owners because of their insistance that it's the best product out there and that i'm completely ridiculous for owning something so huge and outdated. Yet, they have no idea what other products are available and what other options come on other products because they don't do their research. Does yours have an AM/FM radio? What about a voice recorder? Can you set up a playlist as you're listening to it and add on song after song? Do you have a home button and back and forward? No.

I finally tried an ipod, thinking I should at least give it a chance. Well i hate the interface, i hate having to scroll around the circle thing, i hate that once you're at z you can't just keep going to get to a-you have to go all the way back, i hate that you have to make a playlist at home instead of on the go, and i don't even like how it's so small and slippery.

To the point of this blog, after 6 years (and my Creative hasn't even given me any problems up to now), it's finally stopped working. It doesn't charge anymore-shit it took me a week to even find a place that carried a charger for this apparently archaic player. So I'm looking into what new products are on the market. Turns out every company is trying out touchscreens, video players, most have less than 30 g which is annoying because that's what mine was, and they're all a bit smaller. I've narrowed my choices to the following:

The archos
The side buttons are pretty annoying and flimsy. It looks like it might be a first version and could be perfected down the road. It's pretty cool to use the touchscreen and the buttons, but the reviews don't say many good things about it. It does have a cool wifi capability, but i believe you have to get a bunch of plugins.

zen vision
I think this might be my top choice. I really loved my creative;it never broke down and i loved the things i could do with it. This can connect with my comupter and has a great looking screen! it has pretty good reviews as an improvement on just the zen and comes in a 30g size which is great! The battery time is not known to last very long.

zune 80g
Apparently it beats the ipod 80 gig out by just a bit. It sincs wirelessly with my computer and if anybody else has a zune, we can share music with each other for 3 days. It is really tiny and I don't like using touchscreens. I haven't played with one yet at circuit city so i'm not sure how i may feel about it. I think I like the screen better on the zen but it's a tossup between these 2 players!

zen vision m
This is everybody's favorite mp3 player! (for those who look outside of ipod). It's won awards, and it hasn't dissapointed on any levels. It is about to be discontinued and the model is from 2006 so it's not a great screen to watch movies on. Otherwise, it's great for music. But if i'm looking for something to last me another 6 years-I may as well get all the new bells and whistles.


Anybody have some input??

GRE: Check

I'm Done! I Did It! And i didn't do too badly...
After months of studying, and thinking I'd never had to take another standardized test in my life, I sat in a cubicle, stared at an annoying computer screen, and wrote essays, figured out math problems, and matched antonyms. I only had to take the GRE for my application to Yale, and after i stopped worrying about how they would feel about my score, i calmed down and guessed on some answers and used my review knowledge on others. I did quite well on the math, and below average on vocab. I guess it will even out. Especially when they see my glorious GPA from IUP. W-O-O!

Next up: Report on how my recording is going

My two biggets pet peeves

As of late:

I'm telling someone a story. I don't necessarily need advice on the story, I just want someone to listen. I want some sort of supportive reaction out of them. But instead they start to tell their own version of that story. They don't respond to what happened to me, they take a long time to describe something that happened in their life on the subject. Not that i don't care, but really-i don't care. I'm telling you for a reason, not just to hear myself talk. Is it really that hard to listen? To care? To show some sort of reaction that means you're actually listened and are concerned?

My other is the know-it-all.
When I'm attacked by a group of people insisting they know all about something (even if they may be wrong). It's something everyone is ignorant about, they just read things or see it on tv, and insist that they are correct. YOU CAN'T DRINK DIET COKE IT'S GIVING YOU CANCER! or DONT PUMP GAS WHILE ON YOUR PHONE, YOU'RE GOING TO BLOW UP. None of these people are research scientists, and none of them know the truth. Yet you mention for a second that they could be wrong, and they bight your head off!