Two things. First, I'm still pissed about my Zen MP3 player crapping out on me. $200+ is just too much money to be shelling out for something that doesn't even last a year. There's that, and the fact that I actually liked the thing when it worked. I have been using the smaller one that still works, but not as much. It is simply too tedious to load properly for listening to books. I've been looking into getting another that's more conducive to audiobooks, but most advertise their features with music in mind, and that makes it diffucult to know which would suit my purposes. I figured the best brand would be ok, and I'm willing to spend extra money on quality stuff, so I checked out the reviews on Amazon for the ipod. Everyone raves about the thing... well, almost everyone. The people that rate it poorly have the same issues I have with my Zen; when it breaks, that's it, you have to buy another cause there is no fixing it. Plus, I learned that the battery isn't even replaceable!! You would think that after spending a couple hundred on a piece of equipment you could count on getting some use out of it. Apparently that's not the case, and so many people are buying this thing that they either don't care or aren't aware. Time will tell, but I'm not shelling out any money until someone has a player with ample capacity that isn't hard drive based, and a good battery.

Two, I finished the book State of Fear. Was reading some reviews on Amazon, and it's pretty straight forward. People that believe global warming is a threat will not like the book, and those that don't like environmentalists will love it. As for the writing, it's a good story with so-so characters. I think that's because Crichton put his effort into getting his point across and not into putting out a well written story. It makes it easy to read though, and I have a feeling people are going to eat this one up like they did DaVinci Code.

I found CNN's news story on the book, here's some of it....

More than three years ago, the 6-foot-9-inch Crichton read about global warming and grew curious. Having a conventional view that global warming is a threat, he began to study climate data and charts, expecting to find proof. However, the more he hunted, the more unsatisfied he became with the evaluations and speculations.

"I have a lot of trouble with things that don't seem true to me," Crichton says, his large, manicured hands gesturing to his graphs. "I'm very uncomfortable just accepting. There's something in me that wants to pound the table and say, 'That's not true.' "

He spoke to few scientists about his questions, convinced that he could interpret the data himself. "If we put everything in the hands of experts and if we say that as intelligent outsider, we are not qualified to look over the shoulder of anybody, then we're in some kind of really weird world," he says.

There are a lot of people that won't like what he says, like I said. I look at it this way; the man has more money than he knows what to do with, so has all the time he wants. He obviously spent a lot of time looking into this, just digging up that many references would be too much for most people. Bottom line is, he's had 3 years to learn what he did, and what he found contradicted his expectations considerably.