I haven't been blogging a lot lately, and that's in large part due to the fact that I've been housesitting for my Dad for the last 2 and a half weeks; and while I love being over at his house, I find that doing any extensive typing on a laptop is rather irritating (at least on a laptop like his that has that small laptop keyboard). Maybe next time I go over there I'll take a USB keyboard with me, even though that would probably make me a pretty big loser :lol
Anyway, I've been doing a good job budgeting my money as of late, and have been setting money aside, and with the money I've got left over I am thinking of buying a couple things. First, the speakers in my car are dying, and they're dying pretty fast. My right front speaker is totally blown, and it sucks trying to listen to music on a blown speaker. The speaker didn't blow from any suddenly loud music, but rather because I have a fairly powerful amp in my car and stock speakers; and as anyone who knows much about electronics and audio will tell you, over a long period of time having an amp and speakers that are badly mismatched in the amount of output they can produce will eventually blow out the speakers (even if it is the amp that is badly underpowering them).
So I'm looking at all new speakers for my car, and I am also looking at getting a new head unit, even though my current head unit is still pretty good and is functioning ok. My head unit (that's the CD player, FYI) does definitely need to have the laser re-aligned and cleaned, because my head unit has trouble sometimes reading burned CDs, and that is a classic sign of a CD player in need of a "tune up," and since it's probably been close to 3 years since I had my head unit in for servicing, it is long overdue. While I could just get it cleaned, that would no doubt run me between $50 and $100, and I would be without my CD player for a month or so. As a result, I figure this would be a good opportunity to buy a new head unit that will also play mp3s off a burned CD, seeing as my entire music collection is now in mp3 form, and it would be nice to just carry around a few mp3 CDs instead of all the discs I currently keep in my car.
In addition to upgrading my car's audio, I am also going to buy myself a new Mac, since my current beige G3 Mac at home is beginning to have a few problems (as I noted earlier). Plus, there are a lot of cool things I would like to do on a Mac, which I really am limited from doing on my current one. The main thing I would love to do is do some sound editing (a/k/a make some mix CDs :lol). On my current system the processor just can not handle large audio files very well, and so doing anything with sound is very difficult. I also would love to be able to capture audio and images from movies, and I do not have a DVD drive in either of my current computers, so I am unable to do that. Plus, with my mp3 collection growing towards the limit of the hard drive that I have, I would love to get a new hard drive (or hard drives) simply so I can back up all those songs and not have to worry about my entire music collection going down the toilet. Having had my hard drive here at work crap out on me makes me feel like I should probably do this as soon as possible. So anyway, I will probably be buying myself a new Mac in the next couple weeks as soon as I decide which one I want. So between the new Mac and some new car audio, looks like I'm gonna soon have myself some new toys to play with :grin