Snooooowwww

Had our first big snow dump today in Charlestown – I’m guessing we got about 5-6 inches over the course of the day. Very pretty looking but not too much fun to go outside in. I was planning on running a bunch of errands but I decided to just wait until tomorrow and hang out in the house instead. So yeah, pretty normal day 🙂

I did have a little extra entertainment though, because my iPod touch arrived in the mail just before it started to really snow hard. I figured It’d come in hand in Europe, since we’ll be on planes and trains quite a bit. The thing is pretty damn gorgeous – my roommate has had an iPhone for about a month now, so I kind of knew what to expect, but it’s still a lot of fun just to look at. It’s about half as thin as an iPhone and maybe a teensy bit wider, and the screen is obviously spectacular.

Software-wise it’s not that great though out of the box – the wily marketing guys at Apple apparently figured that if the iPod touch were too sweet, then it’d cut into iPhone sales too much. So it doesn’t come with a bunch of the apps that are standard on iPhones, like google maps – you have to use Apple’s shitty webapp depository instead, and run everything through safari. Although the webapps are pretty impressive given that they’re webapps, they suck ass by any other standards.

Easy fix though, as it’s pretty simple to hack an iPod touch and get all those nice iPhone apps installed on it. It took about an hour of watching silly youtube instructional videos. I’ve now got Mail, Notes, Weather and the google Maps application all running smoothly – I decided against the Stocks app since I don’t really have any. I installed some games but they all suck unfortunately – I even had a game boy advance emulator running on it but it was too slow to be any fun.

Other than playing around on my new toy, I’ve mostly just been reading my new book, The Terror, by Dan Simmons. It’s kind of like one part Shackleton and one part Beowulf, lol. I’m about a third of the way done and so far it’s been a lot of fun – nothing groundbreaking I guess but pretty creepy. Also a fun book to read when it’s cold out.