Just as I expected, I was shot down when we entered the mall and I asked her if I could buy an iPad if they had them in stock. However she did have a valid point in that the iPad was just released and it might be better to wait until they get all of the bugs out. But right now I am more interested in getting Robot parts to build a spiderbot with my grandson. That part we haven't discussed yet. My grandson will be continuing on the BotBall competitions and I want to make sure his programming skills are up to the task.

Well, time to think about the trip out to Illlinois with the BotBall team. In a little over 24 hours, I will be carpooling with the BotBall teacher to drive 5 guys out to the Conference. If you would like to know what is going on here, go to http://www.botball.org and look at the information. It looks like my grandson and I will be taking the Prius with the robots and the teacher will be taking 4 other team members. The trip will be about 13 hours and I will keep you posted.

At the moment, I am typing this on a bluetooth keyboard. I decided that since I was not going to be purchasing an iPad that i would at least make it possible to key in a lot of information into my iPhone. In short, I am finding that the keyboard works a whole lot faster than typing on the tiny keypad that comes up on the iPhone screen. That should be obvious to anyone who is a touch typist. I have been a touch typist ever since I graduated high school some 40 years ago. Cool, now I can blog a little more eloquently and hopefully I will have more to say than the simple tomes that I have provided thus far.

Well, now that I have passed on purchasing and iPad ($, utility lacking) and/or a NetBook ($, utility lacking, lack of horsepower) I am in pursuit of getting an Ubuntu laptop up to the point of having everything that I need.  So far, Ubuntu meets my software development and web development needs, my need for reading documents, and my need to get on the web at various times.  The only thing that Windows did for my home system that I need to determine is the apparent lack of a dynamic compressor for audio manipulation.  I used a package on Windows 2000 that gave me the ability to manipulate audio pretty well in a very professional manner.  The dynamic compressor on this thing was pretty impressive since you could set it according to both amplitude and frequency.  I need to find something like that for Ubuntu but so far I have come up short.  Time will tell.  I will be going on vacation this weekend and hope to remedy this issue while I am gone.

There was a time that I thought I might go ahead and purchase an iPad. I am starting to have second thoughts about it. When you get right down to it it is a want and not a need. I already have an older laptop that I have just replaced the battery in. The only thing missing that would make it more useful is to add a Windows operating system. Right now it is running Ubuntu and I pretty much can do everything that I want on it. I would of course make it a dual boot machine because I don't see using the Windows part more than about 20% at best. About the only thing that I would use it for is running some Cakewalk software that I recently purchased. Unfortunately I don't have a Windows XP or 7 package that I can load onto it so I will have to deal with the Microsoft tax that I have tried so hard to avoid. So much for being frugal. A Netbook is not the right answer because of my large hands and the small screen, not to mention the lack of horsepower. S o I will be updating my old laptop in the next few days to get around the problem.

I have this wonderful old LP titled "Switched-On Bach" that was recorded back in 1968.  In fact, it was the recording that got me into Engineering in the first place.  You see, I was really interested in music (and math and science) through high school and when this album came out, it got me very interested in synthesizers.  When I got ready to go to college I seemed to have only two things that I was really interested in.  The first was music, but that seemed to be a little less attractive than my second interest was in how the musical instruments were made.  At the time of this album, I got really interested in how synthesizers were made and also how other audio equipment was designed.  The only thing available to me at the time which had my interests (music, math, science, designing things) was engineering and Electronic Engineering in particular.  So that is what I majored in when I attended college at the University of South Florida.  But back to the original subject which was taking an LP and converting it to MP3s.  I wanted to do this to have something that I could play for my grandson when we went together to the National Botball