Bill Gates knows cool

I’m not sure what concerns me more: the fact that the Wall Street Journal reported that my company is planning thousands of layoffs or the fact that when I log into my company’s intranet site I am greeted by an image that contains a black velvet painting of Elvis and a clown that looks way too much like Pennywise for my liking. Apparently this is a motivation tactic that no one told me about in grad school. “In a pinch, psychotic clowns are always useful in improving morale.”

Haven’t accomplished much tonight other than making some headway in my effort to copy all of my CDs. I don’t think I’ve mentioned it but I’ve picked up a new MP3 player. I got one for last Christmas and though I like it and still use it it is only a 4 GB flash player so I can’t go all out in terms of loading it with my CD collection. Hence as a present to myself I got myself a 30 GB Zune. Yeah, that’s right I got a Zune. That’s how uncool I am.

Well, that’s not true. First off, I am way cool. But more importantly I actually had a pretty valid reason for getting one. My music collection is almost entirely in CD form and I actually care about things like sound quality. I don’t need to feed an iTunes habit because I’ve simply never used iTunes. I don’t see a need to tie myself to one format and amazingly, Microsoft gives me a little more flexibility around just what I do with this thing. Doing the math, it still looks like it is going to be too small for my entire CD collection but it should be more than enough space for all the music I actually care about.

Oh, and since Microsoft forces me to name every single device this has been christened “Julie Version 2.0”. It’s smaller than the original Julie but has more memory and is easier to travel with. And yes, my screen background is a picture of Julie Delpy. I need to have something to look at every day that makes me happy.

Not much else going on today. Looks like we will get an inch or two of snow tomorrow, or as the forecasters here like to call it “a level 3 killstorm.” Honestly, I expect to see lines outside of supermarkets as people horde supplies in the event that it may take them slightly longer to get where they’re going.

Completely random note to end the night: I got an email earlier this week asking if I was interested in purchasing a forty thousand dollar painting. It’s a wonderful painting and a one of a kind original but I’m not sure if it is worth oh, I don’t know, everything I own. It would look great above my TV except that I would have to sell the TV in order to buy it. Still, it’s nice to know that my mailing lists think that I’m well off.