Still buying more electronic doodads.       This sucked up a lot of potential gaming time last night.    The main thing is getting a decent keyboard and mouse for my HTPC (Home Theatre PC).

My XP1800 computer has been turned into a music, photo and video server for our TV room.      The difficulty with it is, the couch is too far away for a normal wireless keyboard to reach.     Now, apparently, the solution is to get a 2.4 Ghz keyboard/mouse.     I found three candidates and like the $50 price tag on this one the best.      

What I don’t know, is if the keyboard will interfere with the home telephones, which also are 2.4 Ghz.     The phones are well over 20 feet away, but I’m still worried about buying something that I can’t really use.

And of all things, I still need a USB cable for my Motorola phone’s digital pictures.    $10 seems pretty pricey for that, but I don’t yet understand the “phone plug” and what I need to know about it to buy the cable.

The Ipod my wife got is a big hit with her.    I hate the thing – it’s probably too “cool” for a big old square like me.     But I find I like the idea of an MP3 player; how much stuff do I miss with my luddite audio ways and my inability to listen to podcasts ? 

I found the Creative Zen which sounds like the answer to me.      It’s a bit more expensive than common Ipods, but has 30GB of capacity making it an incredible value compared to an Ipod.     

The main question is, does it just function like a portable hard drive when you hook it to the PC?      I want to take my CD’s and rip them, then copy the files to the MP3 player.     I don’t want to have to go through Itunes or some stupid DRM-type software, or have that forced on me by the hardware ala Ipod.