Some exciting news…

On pretty much every browser I use, with the exception of Firefox, my homepage is set to Apple’s homepage. I usually click on the hot news ticker underneath the main graphic to check out the haps in the world of Apple. Above the articles in the hot news section, there are three graphics which usually go along with whatever hot news there happens to be for the day. The center of these three graphics, a beige Texas with an aqua-ized blue widget on top of Austin, was an unexpected suprise that has already made my week a happy one.

Apple has opened an Apple Store in Barton Creek Square Mall. This will be the closest Apple Store to us, and the third one that I will have been to. I really wanted to visit one in the DC area while we were up there, but I forgot to find out where they were located (I found out later that there are actually three in the DC area, but none were within a reasonable walking distance for us).

I’ve thought that Austin has needed an Apple Store for a while now…and not just because I wanted one. Austin has a huge Apple community, an enormous University (you guessed it, Concordia University), and I believe the largest MUG (Macintosh User Group) in the country. It just makes sense to have an Apple Store in this town.

I’ll be playing hookey from work tomorrow so that Jen and I can go visit the store. I imagine it will be similar in size and in layout to the Apple Store in the Willowbend Mall up in the Dallas area, but I’ll keep you posted with details, and possibly some pics.

On another Apple related note, one of my projects this summer is to cram our entire CD collection into our 20GB iPod. We’ve had 796 songs on it for about 4 months now, and its time to diversify our iPod. iTunes makes it ridiculously easy to rip songs from CDs. One of the options upon inserting a CD is for iTunes to rip all of the songs off of the CD, and then eject it! Basically, I’ve been sitting in front of my Mac, and inserting a new CD every time it spits one out since 2:30 this afternoon. I’ve managed to increase the song count by over 400. I started by using Apple’s lossless encoding for all of the CDs, but after I watched my spare disk space dwindle under the massive size of those files, I’m back to using AAC. We’ve got a lot of lame CDs, so if I run out of space on the ‘pod, I’ll just axe a few of those albums. I’ll keep you posted on the progress, and the final song count/GB usage.