It appears that Sony has patched their second DRM flaw. Oh, joy. Britney Spears and Billie Holiday CD's sport the new Sony DRM this time around (Sony dumped the first DRM that caused all the problems, and has embraced that of another company).

I found the "Picture Perfect" cache yesterday during lunchtime. More excitingly, though, is the fact that I won an iPod Shuffle from Litehouse Foods! It came in the mail yesterday, and I was completely astounded. There were 1,000 winners, and I was one of them. Crazy. Thanks, Litehouse!

Regarding the Shuffle, however, is this the hardest thing to use or what? How the heck do you synchronize this thing without using iTunes? (I really hate iTunes, by the way. Besides, why should I have to put in a credit card number just to download the free weekly songs? Lame.) And what's the deal with music mode vs. file storage mode? In storage mode, the Shuffle shows up as an external drive, allowing me to copy over MP3s with no problem, but then apparently in this mode the Shuffle can't play them because the songs aren't in the Shuffle's database? Lame. And then when you're using it in storage mode, you now have to stop the USB device before removing it from the USB port? Lame. In music mode, the Shuffle doesn't appear as a drive (it's hidden or something), so I can't transfer files over. Lame. And this is supposed to be easy?

Okay, a little searching around and I finally found a solution: Shuffler. It allows you to transfer files to the iPod Shuffle, and then it rebuilds the database with the playlist, so Shuffle will recognize the music. No iTunes needed! Slick. I previously tried iShuffle, but it didn't work for me. (It looks very pretty, though.) I also checked out, of course, the Sourceforge offering (shuffle-db), but I didn't want to install Python just for something this trivial. Here's more information.

We're both disappointed with Google at how "off" both Google maps and Google Earth are when you overlay satellite images with street maps. Try it: the street lines from the maps and the streets on the satellite photos never line up very well when you zoom in. Here's an example:



Granted, it's only ever off by about 100 yards or so, but can't they compensate for this? I guess you get what you pay for (it's free).

We went and saw "Wallace and Grommit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit" at the $3 theater last night. Although Becky snickered at a few parts during the film, she enjoyed the closing credits the most. Jared, however, slept through it. Sleepy son.   =)