Open heart and other cool things

So slashdot had an article about the iPod mini which is a 4 gigabyte size. This is excellent. That is a great size, because I always thought that the 15gb was too big since I don’t know if I own 15 gb of music. But here is the problem with all this. First it costs $250 which is competitive with the market in the mid sized hard drive based mp3 players, but not good. Second, for that $250 you get the smaller iPod and the ear phones, and the cable for USB 2.0 and Firewire. You don’t get the dock, or the remote or anything like that. So, I’m saying is you get exactly the same accessories as the 15gb iPod, which only costs 50$ more. So I think if I were going to buy one of them I would just get the regular iPod which is only 0.4 inches wider and 0.5 inches longer, but it is 11gb more storage. The disappointing part is that rumors were going around that they would be selling these new mini iPods at a very aggressive price around $99 and they would be using the $70 (OEM) cornice 2gb drives in them. Now if they did use those drives (which they didn’t) and the LCD and battery are the next most expensive parts you could price the player at $150ish still make a small profit while flooding the market with a smaller version of the best mp3 player avialable at a price competitve with the majority of the flash memory based players. Apple could own the majority of the mp3 player market if they would do this, but instead they charge us an arm and a leg and give us no compensation (accessories) to make it more appealing for us to buy the mini instead of the 15gb iPod. This lack of agressive pricing is going to open a hole for larger companies (read dell, microsoft, rio, and iRiver) to jump in the gaps with players based on cornices mini hard drives

The Part about surgery

Dad has the heart cathaderization today to determine if they needed to use the opportunity to do bypass surgery while they have his ribs open, and the good news is that they are not doing any bypasses while they have his heart open, which is a testament to the amazing Catlin super immune system. No matter how fat we are or how much heart disease runs in our family, we are still hyper immune to other silly things like flu’s and clogged arteries even though we all have high triglycerides and bad cholestoral…..mwahahaha…..this is me laughing because of my superior biology. You think you silly good metabolism and your exercise will save you….ha….long live the fat people with super immune systems. Let it be known that my father and I are the only members of our family that have the super immune systems, and that Dad’s is starting to fail….he gets sick much more often then he used to, so maybe I’ll try to keep my stress lower then Dad and try to eat a little healthier, just because it might be a good idea.

OK, so I’ve ranted about my superior immune system now for long enough, so on to my Dad’s surgery. He is having his ribs ripped open tomorrow and they are going to hook him to a fake heart machine. Then they are going to lower his body temperature to 40 degrees Fahrenheit which will make his heart beat once every minute. Then they will cut out his aortic valve and the first inch or two of his aortic stem and replace them with cadaver parts. My grandmother, aunt, uncle, and a few of our families friends are going to be at the hospital tomorrow. He is going in for surgery at 8 am and will be out 4 or 5 hours later, and we should be able to see him about an hour after that. So pray that everything goes well and no one screws anything up like they did for our friend Barb a while back.

OK, thats it, I’m leaving for Springfield to visit Dad and go out to eat, then I’m spending the night at a hotel by the hospital.