Singing the praises of swag

For all of you laboring to complete all the difficult exercises in the Learning Library 2.0 program, let me just hearten you by talking about the cool stuff you'll get as you progress through the lessons.

Now, after finishing the fourth week, you'll get a USB drive with 1gb of capacity. Pretty nice. I used mine to back up my personal data last week when I thought I might have to rebuild my computer. I didn't end up having to do that, but if I had, it would have been pretty straightforward to do so. Unless you're carrying around lots of video, audio, or high quality photos, 1 gigabyte is a lot of capacity. To give you an idea, you're talking about something like 670 floppy disks. That's a lot of school papers! Anyway, a nice gift. If you don't have a USB drive in this day and age, you're probably in need of one.

Now, the completion of the ninth week of the program brings you another, perhaps even neater door prize. The Sansa Clip music player, I have to say, is tres snazzy. If any of you have ever used the IPod shuffle, we're talking about a player of that ilk here. While the Sansa is a bit bigger than the Shuffle, it features a small but legible LED screen, far more capabilities, and doesn't require that you have any specific software installed on your computer. You want to load it with music? You just plug it in and drop files into the "music" folder. For someone like me, who uses Linux on his machine, this is really a boon.

The Sansa also acts as a voice recorder and an FM reciever, two capabilities that aren't always available on little mp3 players. I haven't tried the voice recorder, but the tuner works just fine (provided that you aren't in the basement of the library, beneath many tons of concrete and steel).

In any case, it's a great little unit, and I'm impressed. I see myself using it when next I go on an airplane journey. Combined with noise-isolating headphones, these little music players really help you avoid "jet ear". Now, if I could only find an inexpensive device to make the seats human-sized...