Friday High Fives (01/27/06)

This week's five items, ideas, and individuals that I am thankful for, appreciate, or admire.

DirectTV in my gym
I've been meaning to include this on the Friday High Fives for a while but it never seemed to make the cut. Over the Christmas holiday (a.k.a. during the 2 weeks off I took from work) my company's gym upgraded their TV's to DirectTV. It replaced the crappy reception via antenna that we had to endure and added to the enjoyment of going across the campus to lift. Now I can rock multiple shows on multiple TVs and get great reception regardless of which machine I am on and not have to be subjected to terrible soaps or crappy judge shows.

Podcasts
I'll have to admit it. I never thought that podcasts would catch on as fast as they did or that the content available at this point would be as varied and good as it is. Given that the public and content producers were a little slow to migrate to the internet, portable audio, Tivo, and personal publishing, I thought that we'd see more maturity in podcasts in terms of delivery and content before a big player would jump in like Apple. It seems like, after all those technologies sunk in, the public and content providers didn't need much coaxing to realize the format's possibilities and start creating tons of content for it.

Calphalon Flat Bottom Wok
A work horse in my kitchen and one of the best gifts I've ever received. I've had it for a little over a year and I couldn't imagine cooking (especially in a kitchen as small as mine) without it. Very versatile, well constructed, and a breeze to clean. Highly recommended.

Lisa Loeb
I almost wrote off the 37 year-old singer songwriter but I happen to mention her to ElShocker last week in passing as a joke and he mentioned that she had a reality show on E! now and that she is still fine. I couldn't believe it but it is true and boy was I wrong. Everyone not my girlfriend click this link now.

Half.com
Getting to and from the bookstore for DePaul is a pain in the ass for me especially since I don't have any classes near either the Lincoln Park or Loop campuses this quarter. So when I made the effort to sell the books that I bought last quarter and found out that I would get roughly $40 for the $200 dollars worth of books that I opened about 4 times total (never actually used in either class) I was a little pissed that I even bothered. Thankfully I was able to dump them on Half.com and took a modest loss on them and purchased this quarter's text (which is used extensively thank god) there also. Easy and painless and the only thing that sucks is Media Mail shipping for text books is always more than what Half charges but given the fact that you can recoup the costs in higher sales price it doesn't matter.

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