In an attempt to drop my operating costs (I've been business-ified [oh]) spending I downgraded my phone contract to a mere GBP20pcm from the previous GBP30pcm. As a consequence they gave me a nice shiny new Sony Ericsson K850i:
It's a little chunky, but I'm very impressed with it so far. A lot of reviews I read suggested it's really a camera with a built-in phone rather than a phone with a built-in camera. I broke my Sony Cybershot S90 (4.2mp) last year so I'm hoping that I can use this camera-phone as a reasonable snap-cam replacement until I can afford another proper camera.
Anyway, the phone's not really the main reason for this post.
In November I bought a sexy Samsung YP-K3 mp3 player. The first one was DOA, then shortly after I broke the ONLY moving part on it. So amazingly dissapointed with Samsung for flawless hardware except for a cheap and flimsy plastic on/off slider [flaming]. Afterwards I splashed out and bought a Creative Zen:
A slight step up from the Samsung because this one plays videos. Gimmick I thought at first, but how wrong was I...
Figured it'd be rude not to give it a whirl, but I pulled down a handful of Channel 9 videos and used WMP to sync them to the device. Maybe my PC is just crap, but a 40min video takes 40mins to re-encode/sync [rolleyes].
I have a quite horrific 3.5hrs a day of commuting - 1hr train each way and about 30mins each way of walking. Sucks, but at least I was reading books to pass the time. Unfortunately they were mere story books because my brain can't comprehend technical books at 8am or 6pm [lol]
The Channel9 videos are an almost perfect length for each journey. The video quality is spectacularly good on the Creative Zen and so far battery life has been brilliant.
For anyone who's not bothered with Channel9 before I recommend you check them out. IMHO they're not amazing (and the guy behind the camera gets exceptionally irritating with his continual "awesome" and "ok" type comments) but they are very good for just keeping your finger on the pulse of MS-land.
Today I watched a PM talk about LINQ, but sadly nothing I'd not seen at either Scott Guthrie's or Daniel Moth's presentations. I also watched the interview with the guy who wrote a SWF->WPF/XAML convertor which was interesting as we're currently dealing with some hacked up SWF->.NET code at work.
Tomorrow or next week I've got a video on the .NET CLR's Garbage Collector, VC++ futures, Vista Security and finally VC++ deployment tips. How cool am I?
