Those of you that follow closely will be aware that I’m in the process of ditching the Commonwealth Bank of Australia as my primary banking institute in favour of the ANZ. As part of that process I’m ditching my CBA Mastercard (and it’s eighteen percent interest rate). Before I chop the plastic I wanted to spend the award points that I’ve accrued over the last few months.

In the past I’ve traded the awards for useless crap like a beach volleyball set and a mechanical tape measure. Man that was stupid. I also used the award points to get our espresso machine 18 months ago so they’re not entirely useless.

I checked through the current catalogue and didn’t want to waste the points, either on something stupid or by not cashing in on them at all. In the end I used the points to knock a hundred bucks off a silver 4GB iPod Nano.

Maggie’s been using my iPod Shuffle for the past few weeks so it was a good excuse to buy myself a new one. I also want to use it in the car, though all the FM transmitters are useless. Adam bought a tape adapter which he claims is ace. For 4 bucks I’ll give that a go.

My relationship with the Nano got off on the wrong foot - at first it wouldn’t let me eject it and complained that it was in use. I ignored that warning a few times and I was rewarded with a corrupt memory. Thankfully all it took was one click on “Restore” from within iTunes and things were A-OK. I suspect it was Quicksilver or Spotlight trying to index the filesystem, but whatever it was, it’s not doing it anymore and I’m enjoying Jody as I strut down the street.