Level Orange

Starting a few weeks ago, I began taking my chances at the iTunes/Pepsi free music promotion. I bought a few drinks last year when they tried this, and didn’t win a thing, but the chances are supposedly greater this time around. One in three is a winner, they say. So I said why not and started buying Pepsi when I had a chance.

Unfortunately, Texas isn’t what I’d consider a strong Pepsi state, at least not around Houston. Other than in KFC, Taco Bell and Subway (which all serve Pepsi from fountains), it’s actually a task to find a store that carries cold bottles of Pepsi. Granted, that doesn’t include convenience stores, but who goes in those places anymore? Pay at the pump, I say.

So far I’ve bought four bottles. How many would you guess were winners? One? Two? Try three. Three out of four! Not bad. I have to admit that I cheated on the last one, I couldn’t help it.

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Last week, I received an e-mail asking what I would suggest for a child who shows a clear interest in art and how one would go about making a career out of it:

What ideas might you have to encourage a 9 year old to become a graphics art designer some day? We want to harness his talent and allow him to expand in the right direction.

That’s not exactly an easy question to answer, but it had me thinking about my own son and his future. Now, he’s only two, but it’s something that I’ve already wondered about. What will he want to do? What will he show an interest in? Should I try to guide him down the path I took? Now that someone else was asking me about this, I had to think about it even more.

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Believe it or not, it was actually a tough decision trying to figure out which big screen TV I really wanted. I mean, they didn’t have that many to choose from, but it was just understanding the technology that tripped me up. I had done my research ahead of time, trying to understand what was what and why it was different, but there was more to it than that.

Going into it, I had my mind set on a DLP set. Digital Light Projection is a relatively new technology that’s close to the quality of an LCD or plasma set, but not as expensive. The picture that you get from a DLP set is magnificent as far as I’m concerned. Clear, bright, sharp from just about any angle. And when you’re looking at the HD content they pipe into those stores, you’d swear you’re looking at heaven itself.

BUT there were a couple of hitches to getting one. One, they didn’t have any that went as big as I wanted. The biggest they had was a 50″ RCA set. Yeah, it had the better picture and more features, but it also cost more. So, just to get a feel for how good of a set it really was and how it was selling, I played dumb and asked the salesman about it.

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I went and did it. Thanks to a surprise small fortune that fell in our lap last week, Carol and I went on a mini shopping spree. It’s a funny thing about having extra money…you never know when it’ll come around, and when it does, you don’t always know what to do with it. Save? Spend? Save? Spend? We decided to spend, and spend we did. I assure you our motives were well-intended, and no harm came to anyone, but I have a strange feeling about it all now.

First, I went out looking for something I’d had my eye on for a long time now–an iPod. Ever since January when the iPod shuffle was announced, I’d been scoping them out, thinking that this was the perfect fit. But after giving it some thought, I realized that the measly 1GB wasn’t enough, so I considered the iPod mini, which ended up being only $50 more.

Hey, we’ve got a little extra money. Why not? Now’s the time. Good. Done. I didn’t even get bent out of shape when I bought the Firewire cable that used to come standard with every iPod. I even dropped a Benny for a sweet car charger/FM transmitter/holder/iPod-love device.

You know, there was a time when I thought spending a couple hundred dollars on something smaller than a cassette tape would have been just downright silly, but I suppose technology has since surpassed my sense of reason.

Then…I went and did the unthinkable.

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