Work is buzzing right now, and I'm high on nervous energy (or maybe it was the coffee).  Everybody wants what they want right NOW, and I'm caught in the middle trying to supply it to them.  I haven't had this much fun in ages :-)

I finally made up my mind about the music player I wanted to buy.  The winner was the Creative Zen Touch player, after a lot of consideration.  Several factors made me buy this one over an iPod, apart from my loathing of Apple, which I might have put aside was there sufficient technical reason.  It does WMA, which means I can use a music service other than iTunes (though iTunes does that U2 that I've been lusting after).  The sound quality is apparently better, though I have only second hand information on that so far.  I hooked up my headphones to an iPod and my player, and played the same song recorded at different bit rates, and the Apple sounded shit.  However, the iPod was ripped at 128k and mine was at 196k, so the additional depth could easily be explained by that.  More on that when I have a chance to make a more formal comparison.  For what its worth, the headphones with the Creative offering are shit, but then I have a set of Bose QC2, so everything sounds shit in comparison.  Finally, the battery life of the Zen Touch is rated at 24 hours, though C|Net have apparently clocked it at 27 hours.  Twenty seven hours of continuous music playback on one charge is fucking awesome.
Shiva, or Exodus as it is now called, was released this week.  Its the latest expansion patch for Eve, and so far it rocks.