Some cool stuff from Christmas...

I did manage to score some neat stuff this Christmas:

• A USB-connected tape deck. (I've been trying to record a bunch of tapes to my computer so I could put them on my MP3 player, but all four of my tape decks have something wrong or lacking with them, making them all but completely useless for my purposes)
• Cats: The Commemorative Edition. (I've been looking forward to this for a while now and almost got the opportunity to buy it myself a few months ago, but didn't think I had the money)
• Three Schlock Mercenary books, Under New Management, The Blackness Between, and The Scrapyard of Insufferable Arrogance.
• A set of six Faber-Castell artist pens in landscape colours. (I hope to try drawing stuff, mostly landscapes. Yes, I'll try scanning them and posting them somewhere so you can see, eventually)
• An LED penlight. (when I saw my brother's new penlight I thought it looked cool, but didn't get an answer out of him as to the price, so I knew I shouldn't get one myself)
• The latests Sherman's Lagoon, Confessions of a Swinging Single Sea Turtle.
• A small ceramic cutter with a blade extending a very tiny amount from the handle to cut layers of stuff without going through too many layers. (and also claims that you can't cut yourself on it)
• Some other miscellaneous small things, including a tiny hand-cranked flashlight, a balsa wood glider, a small, posable Wall-e figure, a so-called "Rubik's Cube" game that has nothing to do with the real cube, and other bits and bobs that don't quite matter as much.
• And to round things off, I also received a fair amount of chocolate, most of which, unfortunately, turned out to be mint (while mint is my favourite flavour, too much is very possible).

Interestingly enough, the USB tape deck doesn't need drivers (it acts like a USB sound card, which most modern OSes support), and the only software that came on the CD was Audacity, an open-source audio program.
(the packaging claimed support for Windows and Mac, but it's working beautifully with my new Linux box anyway. Oh how I love using Linux!)

I probably should have started with a typical music tape, as it was, I started with a classical music tape (J. S. Bach's Brandenburg Concertos, numbers 1, 5 and 6) and a tape I made off the radio back in 1999. Neither one was a good choice. With the first, I couldn't figure out how to name the tracks, and with the second, I'm having a hard time trying to cut it up into tracks.
Next time I'll try something by the Acapella group like The Book of James, or Heros of The Faith or something like that.
(you know, stuff I don't have MP3s of, has lots of silence between the tracks, and has easy to figure out track names)

Oh, and apparently I might have had too much chocolate or something, as I have another sore throat again... =>.<=