gifts to self

Yesterday was a pleasant day off. I went to see how much large-scale full-color digital printing costs and buy some things. I was pretty impressed with the quality of the digital prints I saw and the variety of material they can be printed on. I think I’ll go with banner material with grommets in the corners.
Bought a file portfolio folder dealio from Staples. I’m hoping to sort through some stacks of paperwork – mostly things that never had a specific place to be filed like health benefits and investment portfolio information. I think if I file and organize my paperwork I could actually file my taxes early this year. I’m waiting on a couple bits of paperwork before I can start and everything else is pretty much in order.
I stopped at Styles Music to look for something electronic to play with, the Folk Music Center doesn’t carry much in the way of electronics (come on, what about electro-folk?). Anyway, I bought a Boss Micro BR digital recorder. I like it a lot. Its small, can be battery powered and has a built in mic for field recordings, and records multiple tracks. It has a lot of built in drum samples and loops but I’m not too fond of them, I think I’ll use computer generated rhythm tracks. It stores tracks on an SD memory card and links to a computer via USB 2.0. Its my second day of playing with it and there’s still a lot of options I haven’t figured out yet. The user interface isn’t that great or simple but I figure that’s what’s sacrificed for the size. It definitely seems powerful. I also bought a 60 gig WD Passport portable hard drive. I wanted to buy a hard drive and some were better values as far as gigabyte per dollar, but this one is small and looks cool. Yes, I suppose I’m a sucker for the design of technology more than its function. The most recent cell phone I bought was more expensive than others but its small and black with rounded corners – simple but cool. The WD Passport is something between a flash-drive and an external drive. Small enough to carry around easily, its actually about the same size as the Micro BR.