Friday, August 15, 2003  

Alright, so it starts with me sitting in the Foreign Correspondent's Club, surfing the net and generally trying to do some work (the majority of which you can see right here at Tokyopia). Membership of the FCC is one of the perks of this internship, and it's not bad. Not plush, but it has a very central location (behind Central and next to Lan Kwai Fong), and apparently the drinks are some of the cheapest in town. Anyway, while there I took out my iPod to listen to some music, and... the sound is full of static. I figure it might be the headphones, but I have a sneaking suspicion that my old faithful iPod -- by far the best gadget I've ever owned -- is reaching the end of its life.

I planned to test it out at home, but I had to get ready quickly for a Smirnoff party. They're launching some new flavours of vodka here, and we figured that even if the party is rubbish the drinks are free. But before I could head off with Haneal and Kavi, my mom rushes in to tell me that a high-placed friend of ours in marketing at CNN found a job for me there, and that I had to email them immediately. And so I did, and thus a carefree night of drinking became somewhat worrysome as I pondered the consequences. I'm three DAYS into my internship at IHT; CNN apparently want me right away. And though it's what I want to do, the CNN job (fully paid, none of this intern stuff) would be in TV. I've never done TV before, so what if I screw it up?

As predicted, the Smirnoff party was pretty bad, but the drinks were great. To enhance the "party" mood they handed out whistles (WORST IDEA EVER) and threw out those confetti poppers... one of which landed on our table, knocked over the only glass with any alcohol inside, and spilt said alcohol all over my pants. It shouldn't come as a great shock then to learn that we left once we had our fill of their new Citrus, Orange and Raspberry (aka Cough Syrup) vodkas for Dragon-i. Where we, as always, had a great time in the company of (but not quite in the company of) a gaggle of stunning models.

Despite it being a Thursday night, I managed to get home at 2am, and checked my email instantly to see... no reply from CNN. OK, now I'm even more nervous. While I was up, I decided to try my iPod with other headphones. No dice. Tried it with the Nokia Music Stand. Same deal. Looks like it's not just those headphones, then.

As I'm just about to leave for work the next morning, mulling how I'm going to manage to get someone to read my email for me and alert me the instant CNN reply, suddenly I hear the mail chime and look back to see CNN's response. They have a position, they think I'd be good for it, and I should call them ASAP. And I did. They want someone to help out in the control room and write stories for their evening show. The hours are 5pm to 11pm. And they can wait for me to finish my IHT internship and start September 1st. And so there you go -- once the formality of a proper, official offer comes in when I meet them on Monday, I should officially have a proper job starting September 1st at CNN, and I absolutely can't wait to start.

Now that the serious business is through, though, there's still one more little thing that needs to be resolved... my iPod. I've been looking to buy a new 15GB iPod for the last month or so anyway, so I was mulling buying a new one to replace the old one anyway. In the end, I figured I'd take it to the good people at Viewcon to take a look at, in case it can be repaired (relatively) cheaply. If they can repair it, I'll give it to my sister. If they can't, well... I have a stylish 5GB portable hard disk. So as I'm paying for the new 15GB iPod, suddenly I hear some rather distinctive Legend of Zelda music in the background. Surely that has to be mine, since nobody else is dorky enough to carry THAT on their iPods, right? Right. It was mine. They plugged my iPod in to test it, and it worked. They tried plugging it into something else, and it worked. I was flabbergasted, and it made me look like a complete idiot! Still, not willing to trust the apparently faulty equipment at home, I bought a new remote/headphones set (I broke the last remote) for my sister.

I'm kinda sad to have given the old iPod away, since (as I noted) it is probably the best gadget I've ever had and has served me well over the years... but the new iPod is sweet. Aside from having three times the memory, it's also MUCH slimmer and comes with a neat dock. I snapped a picture of it sitting in the dock below:



The buttons aren't as intuitive as the last one, but what is REALLY cool about it is how all the buttons and the scrollwheel aren't mechanical anymore, they're touch-sensitive (like the trackpads on laptops). It's just so much slicker that way.



Incidentally, I've been told that I should implement a comments system here. Should I? Will anyone actually use it? Do tell!

Posted at 11:13 PM

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