Viva Las Vegas!
Decided to head out to Vegas for a night to see Paul and Carrie. The drive out on Saturday morning was a dream - 3 hours and 40 minutes to cover 286 miles for an average speed of 78. A breeze to say the least. Had a great time out there. Paul and Carrie have simply done wonders with the new house - especially the landscaping in their back yard. Lunch, cocktails, darts, BBQ, more cocktails, etc - just catching up and whatnot. The drive home, however, was not so pretty. I got a much later start than I intended so the Sunday "drive home" traffic that is so typical of the 15 between Vegas and LA was simply horrendous. SLOW going into Primm/State Line... SLOW going into Baker... SLOWWWWW going into Barstow... VERY VERY SLOW going into Victorville - 20MPH ALL the way down the Cajon Pass... at this point, I realize that I REALLY need to pee. I hate stopping when I'm on a road trip so I continued. I didn't even make it onto the 91 and had to pull off and relieve myself. After that, it was a smooth sail home. Total driving time SIX fucking hours for a new average speed of 47 (ughhhh). The great part is that I got so much music onto my iPod before leaving that the drive was full of a wide variety of music. I've finally gotten around to ripping all of my DJing CD's - like my Time-Life Sounds of the 70's, Sounds of the 80's, Sounds of the 90's and the "Now That's What I Call Music" series. Next up are all the professional DJ cd's I have amassed - that's gonna take a while. Anyway - even with the iTrip pulling juice from the iPod, it made it out to Vegas, and then even lasted the rest of the day out in Paul's garage while we were throwing darts! It must've been a solid 10-12 hours of continuous play, a portion of which was with the iTrip! Very impressive. The key is loading a playlist and leaving it alone since the iPod has a 64MB cache. The unit loads this cache up with the next 64MB worth of music and shuts off the battery-draining hard drive. As long as it knows the next 64MB of songs you want to play (ie, a playlist) then the hard drive doesn't have to be accessed again until the memory is nearing depletion. Brilliant. In fact, the new 5th Generation 60GB iPods (with video) have double the cache size further extending its battery life. I'm very happy with my early adopting of the 4th generation iPod Photo 60GB. Still not regretting the purchase at all. It's been over a year now. I use it almost daily at work, and usually driving home as well. I need to get a better grip on playlists and whatnot. More on that later.Turkey Day is approaching... Thursday Thanksgiving Dinner with the Fulton's, then out to Vegas early Friday morning to have Thanksgiving Dinner at Paul and Carrie's! Driving home on Saturday at some point in anticipation of some REALLY bad traffic on Sunday of a holiday weekend.