It has been very travel-intense weekend. To Stamford, connecticut and back on Thursday and then to Fairfax, Virginia on Friday-Sunday. We followed the American tradition of burning cheap fuel during the Thanksgiving! [Gas prices went under $2 (rather surprisingly but timely) for the first time in quite some time and my sweet old buddy Honda Accord logged 800+ miles in 3 days!]
As we drove down the New Jersey Turnpike in a bumper to bumper traffic, rest of America was busy on the “Black day Friday” in a shopping mess. Perhaps the only country in the world to designate a day in a year just for shopping. If items sold on this day are truly cheap or truly worth is debatable.
I had been wanting to buy a cheap mp3 player (having bought iPod already no apprent reason besides the “cool” factor) exclusively to listen to Podcasts during my train commutes to class. I found this SanDisk m230 a cheap buy and I couldn’t find a good store online selling it cheaper than what CircuitCity offered me on Black Friday. I grabbed it.
For under $45 i thought it was a good deal i was waiting for. Besides being the mp3 player, it serves as a USB drive in addition to being a voice recorder. With a decent stereo headphone, a FM tuner and arm-band, I can’t ask for more. I am glad I didn’t have to install yet another music software (plug USB, drop files and good to go!), though it does come with one that supports Rapsody and Audible. With three free books for download from Audible, dude! I can’t ask for more.
The only sucky part of buying a new gadget is opening (I should say ‘failing to open’) the impossibly sealed plastic packaging with no obvious solution even in this Internet world, except this wierd “OpenX”.
