Selenay's Ramblings

I bought myself a toy. I've been saving for it for months, telling myself that there's no point buying before I have sufficient in the fund because then I'll have to scrimp on the model and accessories. Having the money in the fund coincided happily with my birthday, although I chickened out a bit on my birthday because I panicked at the money. What if I needed it for something else?

Yes, I am slightly unhinged right now.

But on Wednesday, I went out and did the deed. I am now the proud owner of a 64GB iPod Touch. Go me!

Why go for the larger storage? Well, I have over 23GB of music and podcasts already. The iPod Touch can synch with my photos (add 6GB) and potentially carry documents and other things as well. It also has an HD video camera. Why get the 32GB model when I would be pushing its limit already? So I saved to make sure that I could get the bigger one :-)

Setting it up was much easier than I thought it would be (my old iPod took me hours to sort out and seemed to involve much Googling for information when things didn't work, Apple appears to have made improvements) so my music and podcasts are already on. I'll get my photos synched at the weekend. Why yes, that will make two backups of my photos. That must be enough, surely?

I still can't believe that I've got something with more storage and power than my first desktop that fits in a pocket. I'm living in the future. It's awesome :-)

So far, I've got my mail and calendar synched with Gmail. I've installed Twitter, Skype and Facebook apps to keep in contact. I've got the BBC News app installed, which is filled with win. I might also have put Angry Birds and SimCity Delux on. Yeah, yeah, I'm already installing time-wasters.

Next task is to find a simple spreadsheet tool and work out how to put data files onto the iPod Touch - then I can download a .csv of my LibraryThing library to have access wherever I go. A slightly more sophisticated Notes app would be nice. And I need to work out how to put .pdfs on and view them through something like DropBox. Apparently ooTunes will give me access to BBC Radio on my iPod, which would be amazing, and even enables recording and scheduled recordings.

Then I shall look around and see what other indispensable apps there are. After all, I'm sure there are things the iPod can do that I haven't thought of yet. Any particular suggestions from my f-list?

In other news

I am working on a query for a new report that is based on some new views/tables. It's proving painful. Most of what I'm accessing are really simple views on properly indexed tables that don't have any noticeable performance issues compared to the base table.

Then there is Bastard!View. It's got three unions. Each union subquery is for a different table joined to several tables and the indexing is absolutely awful on all them. I privately suspect that even with good indexing, this view is going to be horrendous and I wish that I didn't have to join it to two other large tables but that's the only way to get the data that the business wants.

If I had my way, I would get Bastard!View turned into a materialized view and slap some good indexes on, but I have a suspicion that it might be a nasty matview to load every day.

My day definitely sucks. The business wants the new report my mid-December. When I finally get the data model correct, I still have to sort out the report layout and the parameter input layout (we have nothing like it that I can copy, damn them) and then I have to ask another team to walk me through creating the necessary stylesheets to be able to output this as an Excel report. I'm going to do well to get this ready in time, particularly if you consider all the other things that I'm working on.

Suddenly, I feel like I deserve every cent of my salary.

Despite the general suckiness of today, there is one good thing: got the iPod set up last night and it works beautifully :-)

There was a slight hitch initially when the PC didn't recognise it properly, but Apple's support page guided me to the solution and the PC is now happily mating with the iPod.

All of the nightmare stories that I'd been hearing about iTunes 7 have also been (so far) disproved. It's very easy to dump music on my iPod from iTunes and I like the centralisation.

And I tested it's ability to actually play stuff last night, which is very fine. Now I just have to load it up with stuff before I go to Canada...

If anyone knows of particularly good podfic out there, I'd love some links :-)