Well Games plus an old iPod experience. Audiobooks. Here I sit in the UK over on business. I watched the presentation Steve Jobs made today and promptly rolled the dice updating my itunes and ipod software on my powerbook G4. It is my last night here and it just seemed so cool to play Pac-Man on the plane on the way back. So I bought and added that to my 5th Gen ipod.

The game played great. Until I plugged in my Shure E3c ear buds. Which by the way are great on long flights to Europe. Just plug them into the headphone jack on your seat and find one of the channels with just light static. Filters out all but the loudest screaming babies. Yet I digress. Back to Pac-Man on an ipod. After I started playing the game I noticed two things. If you have a fairly full ipod and have not done a defragmentation (it is a hard drive after all) via doing a reset and resync the sound in pacman can get glitchy. Not bad but noticable. The real kicker. I had been listening to Harry Potter in audiobook. I accidently hit play while scrolling the little yellow guy around to chomp ghosts. Next thing I know I am hearing Harry Potter under the pacman game. Perhaps its a feature. You can turn off or down the game audio. So maybe its meant to go chomping with say Gorillaz rocking in the background.

Speaking of audiobooks. I have been an Audible subscriber for years. My monthy credit renewed today while in the UK. What better time to listen to a 5 hour book by Orson Scott Card than the flight back? Oops itunes tells me I am not authorized on my audible account for this laptop. I have been a subscriber for a few years and a couple of old pcs that are not around any more are tapping out the number they allow you. I found a quick email to support and they knocked off the two oldest authorizations within 10 minutes. Now I can listen to my book on the way back. So who says all DRM is a pain? Ask nicely and it is not so bad. Big thanks to Bryan at Audible support for the prompt service.

-George – In the Trenches podcast