Man vänjer sig.

My trusty old first-generation iPod, which I've had and used daily since March 2002, is on its last leg. Unless I recharge it straight away when I get home, the battery will run down before I get to the tube the next morning. (Not that I'm complaining, as some people do — rechargeable batteries have a finite lifetime. I've had mobile phones break down in a shorter time than that.) This means that, unless I buy a new battery, break into the sealed shell and replace the old battery (at the risk of breaking it permanently), my old iPod, while I can still use it as an external hard disk, will soon be practically useless as a portable device.

So I got a new one. I am now the proud and so far happy owner of a 60GB iPod photo. And because I've been thinking of getting a USB memory for a long time, I added a few hundred SEK and got a 1GB iPod shuffle too. (To my chagrin, I notice that there is a space missing between two sentences on the packaging. My fault, I'm afraid; I did that feature label (and two others, one for the never-released 256MB model) late at night the week before I left.)

Both machines are working well so far. I have mainly used the shuffle as a USB memory, though. (Did I tell you I like electronic gadgets?) I haven't checked yet whether the improved sound with the iPod photo is because it has better sound in itself, or because I finally invested in a pair of decent headphones instead of using the cheapest crap I can find that does have a name on it. No, I don't use the white earphones; I have never found a pair of earbud phones that didn't keep falling out and that weren't physically painful when they did stay in.

The time that I did not work this weekend, I spent listening to music: The Knife, Suicide, Merzbow, Les Negresses Vertes, Coil and Marillion. Yes, I'm a weirdo.