P.S. Tom DID notice the eggplant...though I suspect he didn't at first. He was finishing up the last of the casserole last night, and picked out a bit of eggplant. He glared at me. "Stop. Just... stop." sigh. I tried. And he still ate some, even if it made him cranky, and he picked them out last night.

Also - I have my Zune. I am seriously loving it. The size is not so bad as I'd feared. I'm getting the hang of the touch-screen, though it's taking a bit. It does not appear that I can snag files off my computer from the Zune without plugging it in (though I can send them from my comp to the Zune), but we'll see if I can't set it up to sync on its own and maybe do it that way. (I have waaaaayyyy too much of everything to let anything sync automatically. ever.) I'm a little annoyed that I can't play/pause without looking at the screen, and that the screen brightness is only "low - med - high" (the iPod had a full range of 0-100). Also... is there no sleep timer?! I counted on that every night with my nano...

Though, as Tom has pointed out, the screen issue I ran into with the nano might have been the result of me rolling over onto it in my sleep. I *tried* not to do that, but if I got tangled in the headphone wires, I'd sometimes pull the iPod over into the rolling-onto-zone. That happened briefly last night with the Zune, and Tom suggested what I'd already been considering:

Use the nano to fall asleep to. (The screen is already iffy. I don't need the screen to play/pause, or even navigate to some degree. Also: it HAS a sleep-timer. ...and, I feel awful neglecting something that I used to share basically every waking moment with. ^^; )


...but, I should give some positives on the Zune. Because I really do like it - the things mentioned are the oooonly downsides. (Well, that, and I suspect the headphones they sent are crap.) I can set my own picture as the lock-screen image, yaaaaay. It's pretty. It's REALLY pretty - the interface, the screen (I don't think I've ever seen a black like this on a screen... even *I'm* drooling over the OLED!), pretty much everything. Flipping through albums is a nightmare for me, because, as Tom put it, "Things are designed to work with the PERFECT music collection." I don't have album art for everything! Good lord. I'm lucky if 3/4 of my music has the basic tags filled out correctly. But, you can flip through your stuff via artist, album, playlist, genre, the usual mix. AND! You can shuffle a playlist on the fly! And if you don't like it (it shows in tiny-print what the next three tracks will be), you can unshuffle, and then RESHUFFLE!!! There was NO reason for my old nano to not have had that ability, and it always irked me.

Interface is insanely intuitive. I'd read somewhere how to "go back" in a menu, so I was ready for the brief moment of confusion when I tried to do it - but once I saw it (at the top of the screen, there's a zoomed-in cropped chunk of your previous menu's name - tap on that), I reeeeaally liked it. I can get from one thing to another really fast, and it all just feels really fluid. The visual style of the thing is just really, really nice, it's very sleek and modern and simple but stylish.

...which is WEIRD. The Apple interface feels old and chunky next to the Microsoft one. Who'd-a-thunk.

Labels: cooking, life in general, product whoring, technology