I went to the store and bought a couple of surge protector power strips last night to clean up some of the cord mess we have going on with the 20 bazillion power strips and cables and crap behind the TV upstairs.

Unpacked it, unplugged the old power strip, plugged the new one in, plugged in the cable modem, plugged in the wireless router -

• and honest-to-God fire shot out of the surge protector.

Just as quick, it was out, with a slight puff of smoke coming out the back of it. It wasn’t enough to be really worried about, just enough to make me scream like a little girl and drop it in fear for my life.

It also took down one of my circuit breakers, so I had to go downstairs and flip that back on.

Guess I’ll be taking that back.

I went to the store last night and picked up Best of Trance, Vol. 5 because, well, I dig the whole trance music thing.

It did bring up an interesting thought, though, as I was ripping it onto my iPod: I have my music classified by genre (as do most of you iTunes users out there) and I’m finding that it’s really hard to classify electronic music. I mean, like, trance, dance, techno, house, drum and bass…

I look at the way I have things in the ol’ iTunes library, and I’m irritated with the inconsistency. I can see why the default iTunes classification is “Electronica/Dance.”

After I finish putting the album art into all of my tracks, I guess I’ll have to go back and reclassify.

Okay, I realize I’m going to sound like I’m so living in 1996 or something, but I have my car getting worked on this morning at the dealership and they have free wireless networking. This is crazy shit. I can get stuff done while I wait. Can’t beat that.

Speaking of Internet access, our Comcast cable ‘net access seems to be giving me fits in the last couple of days. The DNS lookups… don’t look up. Like, it just times out. Sometimes you can get common sites - google, Yahoo! - to come up, but that’s about it. I tried resetting my router and my cable modem (just in case it was a hardware problem; I hadn’t rebooted either for like a year) but to no avail - DNS still lags. Jenn’s calling Comcast today.

On the way back in to work from the car dealership this morning, Jenn called me to tell me that, prior to calling Comcast to complain about crappy DNS, she fired up the computer.

Everything works fine.

I’m hoping they fixed whatever was wrong and that’s that. But I’m prepared to go home tonight and find it down again. It never fails, right?

I bought one of the fourth generation (4G) iPods - the 60GB iPod Photo - and it came with a USB charger and a USB-to-dock connector cable. I plugged it in, attached the iPod, and it charged right up.

Later, I tried to attach Jenn’s iPod (my 3G 15GB iPod) to that charger to charge it up, and it doesn’t charge - it stays on, but it doesn’t charge.

Turns out this is a known issue. The Apple Store page for the USB charger says it “supports iPod shuffle, iPod mini, iPod photo and iPod with click wheel.” Which subtly excludes 3G iPods (they don’t have a “click wheel”).

Interesting that they don’t outright say anything about this anywhere in the official Apple support section. You’d think more people would wonder about this.