Geeky Things I Have Done While Driving
- Last Week: In lieu of an iPod, I have opened my PowerBook in my lap, turned the volume up, and listened to the Audible podcast of This American Life while in traffic. The volume is soft, so I have to listen carefully.
- Yesterday, 5:15-5:50pm: I took my earbuds along with me so that I could put the PowerBook on the passenger seat and hear the stories more clearly.
- This Morning, 7:40-7:50am: Burned a CD of the aforementioned iTunes-purchased Death Cab for Cutie album so that I could listen to it at full volume for the rest of the drive and in future drives. The burn finished just before I got out of the snarl.
To My Mom: I committed each of these safety travesties while at a full stop.
October 28th, 2005 at 11:09 am
OMG! What a geek! OMG!!!!!!!!!!!
October 28th, 2005 at 2:44 pm
“This Morning, 7:40-7:50am: Burned a CD of the aforementioned iTunes-purchased Death Cab for Cutie album so that I could listen to it at full volume for the rest of the drive and in future drives.”
Um, is there any reason why you didn’t burn CDs for any of the other “hobo stereo” rigs?
October 28th, 2005 at 7:54 pm
I think it’s illegal to use headphones while driving :-/
I need to go get some high speed CD-RW discs, burning a new write-once disc every time you go out driving is just wasteful…
October 29th, 2005 at 3:32 am
I should note that I only use one earbud, keeping the other ear open for listening.
I’ve been thinking about some CD-RW discs too… that’s an excellent idea.
October 29th, 2005 at 9:37 pm
No… no… don’t lie… i’ve seen you stuff all kinds of ear buds in each ear WHILE driving. You, my friend, are a menace!
October 31st, 2005 at 10:14 am
Of note, I’ve had horrible luck with all of the FM transmitters used to link a portable device to the car radio — I’ve gone through several of them before giving up. One of them even had a very obvious problem: you could tell it was tuned by hand by the manufacturer. When you were holding the device, the tuning was zero-beat, dead-on to any of the frequencies you selected, but if you let go of it the thing drifted just enough up the dial to introduce plenty of static. .5MHz above or below, it just wasn’t possible to get a clear signal.
The old “fake tape” style connectors were decent until they jammed into your cassette player. Eventually, I just broke down and got a stereo that had a line-in — something surprisingly difficult to find! (Alpine, Blaupunkt, and some others tend to have them either with or without an external adapter…)