Gear Head

First off, thanks to everyone who gave me a shout off that last post. I hope you all had a great holiday weekend!

Now, on to our regularly scheduled post…

I’m such a gear junkie. I mean a straight up material ‘ho. I just love getting stuff. So, you know, Christmas is the most wonderful time of the year for ‘Ol Kyu.

This year is no exception.

I got an IPod this year. Ohohoh…not just an IPod, but a Video IPod…30 Gig. I’m looking at this thing right now and I’m in awe of it. It’s smaller than my wallet and has more disc space than my PC. Well, almost more space.

I’ve been fighting the whole IPod wave. I actually got an MP3 player for Christmas about 4 years ago and exchanged it. Back then, I just wasn’t into that kind of “stuff”. It was…and to a certain extent still is…video games. But, it was more than that:

There’s this weird thing that happened to me when I became a parent…I stopped tuning out the world. My awareness for my environment suddenly jumped to Ludicrous Speed. I’m not talking about saving dolphins, but just my view of my immediate area.

“Was that the baby?”

“Do you smell smoke?”

“I need to move my keys, the baby might poke his eyes out.”

“Don’t give the baby a neckless, he might use it to escape from his crib, snag it on a pacifier and loose his grip to fall into a carelessly placed glass of water and drown!”

Some people may call that paranoia…I call it the “Law of Averages”.

So for a while now, I didn’t want to have anything that might block me from hearing when something was “amiss”.

I’m over it now.

And now I’ve got this Video IPod. I’m slowly venturing out onto the internet to find all the Hacks and Mods that I can find for it. My first so far has been a freeware tool that allows you to correctly format several different media files into the “MP4” structure that IPods require for videos. Not much of a Hack, but it allows me to watch all four seasons of Red Vs. Blue and downloaded porn flicks. Next will be the car adapter, then skins, and probably a dock.

No, I will not be watching videos while I drive…maybe the porn, but that’s it.

I had the same “toy problem” with camping gear.

I went on a hiking trip a few years back on the Appalachian Trail with my brother and a good friend. (Oh, you’ll get stories about that trip, don’t worry.) We “trained” for nearly two years, hiking and camping every weekend, read books, joined a hiking club full of folks that had hiked the trail and gathering up gear.

Oh, the glorious gear! In the course of 2 years the three of us collectively purchased 7 tents, 5 sleeping bags, 5 backpacks, 5 water filters, 6 pairs of boots, 7 camp stoves (we built 6 to 8 others out of soda cans that didn’t make the trail), 35 waterproof stuff sacks, 9 hiking poles, 12 Nalgene™ water bottles of various sizes, 4 water bladder drinking systems, 6 different knives/camp tools, 2 shovels, and tested 47 different food stuffs…including the foul tasting “energy gel” shot packet of caffeine and other “performance enhancing” supplements, that we all pretended worked but really didn’t. My wife thought I lost my mind and was preparing to start up a militia and move to the woods. Excluding the guns and mindless zealots to lead, I was close to achieving that goal.

But, I digress…that’s how I get sometimes. I focus on a “hobby” and go ape shit collecting as much junk as I can for it.

Another example: I purchased, not one, but two $40 “light guns” for my Xbox this year. Anyone who knows their Xbox games will know that there are only 2 games for the Xbox that use the light gun. So, why did I buy two? John Woo, baby. You gotta use two guns.

I’ve got to find a way to break this cycle, because I’ve got more clutter than a single human family should have. Until that day comes, I’ll just watch my Revenge of the Sith on a 2” x 1.5” screen until my eyes bleed out.

At least I don’t have a Blackberry.