Me, on the bus heading home after dinner with family, ABBA blaring from my shiny new iPod; a man, at the bus stop by Denny Park, wearing a jean jacket with the words “DISCO SUCKS” emblazoned on the back. I’d like to claim that we looked daggers at each other, but he never turned around, and the bus quickly passed him by.

Speaking of iPods, I’ve been toting the 4th generation, 40GB iPod around for a week now. The stability of it seems questionable; it’s locked up quite a few times already. Otherwise I appreciate some of the shiny new features it has over my old first generation iPod, although the overhyped “Shuffle Songs” feature is pretty useless to me - they should have made it “Shuffle current playlist”. And I wonder why after three generations they can put in details such as automatic pause when the earphones gets disconnected, but yet haven’t gotten around to labeling the earphone buds with “R” and “L” in a way that doesn’t get immediately obscured by the foam covers.

SIGGRAPH all of next week.