Mint Condition

I am trying to make a hypothetical decision. I have an old iPod mini 1G that has a dying battery. I haven’t been able to use it for 2-3 years now because it doesn’t last long enough for any consequential trip. I now face two options (should I choose to spend the money) to resolve the issue. Since I’m out of a job, spending a lot of money isn’t ideal, but I’d like a better music player solution. I’m currently using my Nokia 5610 phone for music, and I only have a 2GB card on it.

iPod touch
This would put me out about $300. Since I don’t have a job, this isn’t ideal. But the touch has wifi and nice large color screen, and hey, it’d be a fun new toy to have! 16GB will hold my whole library (currently 12GB), though it doesn’t leave a whole lot of room for growth. But I can do much more with the touch than just play music. And it has a touchscreen! One disadvantage to the touch is not being able to change songs while it’s in my pocket. To solve this, I could get the headphones with remote for an additional $30.

iPod mini
I could upgrade my iPod mini by installing a new battery with higher capacity than the original and replacing the 4GB hard drive with a 16GB CF card, all for around $60. This would provide me with enough space for my library, as well as enough battery life to be useful. But I’d have no wifi and would be stuck with a tiny cramped black and white screen.

iPod classic
This is sort of the half-brother third option. Buying the classic would cost about $250, a bit less than the touch, but I’d get 120GB of space—plenty of wiggle room. However, there’s no wifi. The screen is smaller than the touch, but it’s still color, and much nicer than the mini.

So that is my dilemma. If I were to pick one of these options—say I had the money to spare, which one should I go with?

I have been keeping rather meticulous record of my income (though I currently do not have a job) and expenses for both money I keep at home and my checking and savings accounts by hand, using a sheet I created in Excel and printed out. After several months of this, I thought it’d be nice to be able to enter it all in Excel instead, and be able to do other things with the data as well, like graph my spending habits over time.

However, the problem I have encountered is that sometimes there are multiple transactions on one day, and sometimes no transactions. Excel doesn’t like this. If I try to graph this data, it will be skewed, and the time axis won’t be accurately to scale. What I need to be able to do is accurately track the totals in each account over time, taking into account dates where no transactions occurred and dates where multiple transactions occurred. Though simple for a human to solve, this quickly becomes cumbersome in Excel—thus why I have yet to figure it out! If anyone has tackled this problem, I’d love to hear how you did it.

Sometime in the middle of the night—my guess is around 4 a.m.—a drunk 16-year-old punk crashed his car into a telephone pole, cutting out our power for about 7 hours. So that was fun. It also brought to light the need to install power and phone lines underground. Sure, it’s a big project, but it saves a lot of hassle. We have power go out pretty much every year around here; a year or two ago, we lost power for nearly a week due to a huge windstorm. The city of Monroe, north of us, has all their lines underground, saving it a lot of hassle. Oh well, my rant probably won’t change anything in this overly governmental society.