And so it begins

I need to get in shape. Not that I'm out of shape. But, for reasons which I'll not get into right now, I need a good solid three months of basic endurance building. I should have started in January and therby be where I need to be right now, but I have been bad about even getting to the gym.

Today, however, I got there. I made it relatively painless, and was only there for twenty minutes, as these things must be eased into. I checked the place out a little, ran a 13-minute mile on the treadmill, and got myself out of there. I need to get that time down, of course, and I'll make use of the other machines as I work into a program, but hopefully no craziness comes along to throw me off track. I'll go back on Sunday and try that again. Hopefully this effort gains altitude.

My peripheral problem out of this effort is that I have up 'til now dissed portable MP3 players in lieu of my MP3 capable portable CD player. It seemed silly to spend so darn much money on a little device that couldn't even play my existing CDs. However, I now realize that trying to do any sort of exercise with a portable CD player (MP3 capable or otherwise) is itself completely impractical.

But I want utility darn it. I refuse to get an MP3 player-only type of device. For example, my USB flash drive takes an SD card. And I use SD cards in my digital camera. So now I'm going to shop for an SD capable MP3 player. Yes the quality will suffer some, but if I can then interchange all of my SD cards between three devices, I'll feel better about the bang for my bucks.


27 MAR Update
I have found a winner and should be enjoying a more stable on-the-go musical experience sometime next week. This little guy gets good reviews on three different sites and in addition to the built-in 128MB of memory there's an SD slot. So, I saved the $40 extra it would have cost to buy the 256MB version, and I used that towards a 512MB SD card. The larger SD card will go into my USB flash drive, and I'll use the 256MB SD now in my flash drive for my MP3 player, giving me 384MB of music, which should be plenty for a workout (should be able to fit nine or ten albums of whatever I want at the existing bit-rate of my MP3s, or I can resample them and double it... I just don't see myself complaining that my whole 7GB music library isn't with me at all times).