The last thing I need to do in my life is spend more time staring at a screen, but I do have some artworld earnings that have been burning a hole in my pocket, and the Asus eeepc 900 doesn’t come out for two more weeks, so in a fit of shopaholia, I bought myself a new mp3 player. Here it is, an 8gig Creative Zen.

And it is making me so very, very happy. Plays video (that’s an image from He Who Gets Slapped, my favorite clown humiliation movie), is damn loud, and has an SD card slot, which means that I can load stuff onto it whenever I feel like it without worrying about filling it up, and preview pictures from my camera without going to a computer. And it was mighty cheap. Less than a 4gig Nano and even with an additional 8gig SD card, cheaper than the 8gig Nano

The down side is that the software is a little wonky, and it has a proprietary video encoder which is very slow. But that’s a slight piece of bad news compared to the prospect of watching Woody Woodpecker cartoons on the subway when ever I want.