I love my mp3 player. I write that in fear in case I tempt fate and it breaks, but hey, it’s not even a year old yet, so let’s hope not.

I picked up my Creative Nomad Zen Xtra 40GB player last year in America, and coming in at around £118 thanks to the currency differences, it was quite a bargain. It was far from a new range at the time, and I think you’d do well to find one new now seeing as they introduced more expensive models that do the same thing but look snazzier in the process.

But I’m not one to care about prettiness. After all, up until around 2002 I was still walking around with a massive bulge in my pocket that was actually just my walkman. Then there was a switch over to a discman, and again, I was perfectly happy to have such a bulky object attached to me as long as I could mix music and motion. So when I finally made the move to an mp3 player, my biggest priority wasn’t finding a player that will fit inside my mouth or be a gaudy white colour, but one which sounded good and had enough space to carry more than I’d ever have time to listen to. The Zen Xtra does that job wonderfully, and even though I sometimes receive nosey looks on the train, as if to ponder, ‘what kind of ugly ipod is that?’ it’s actually quite shiny and sleek once you strip back it’s free leather case – yes a free accessory.

At the same time I bought the mp3 player, I also made the great retail judgement to purchase Sennheiser PX100 headphones, and there’s no doubting that those are the best personal headphones I’ve ever owned. Truth be told, I think they even have a better bass response than my aging Sennheiser studio headphones, and for such a small package that folds away neatly in your bag, they’re an audiophile’s dream. The only small negative is that their open design means sound easily spills outwards, so I tend to tread carefully on busy trains so as not to annoy people – unless they annoy me first, then I let the volume rip.

The story doesn’t finish there, however, because in fact a second mp3 player joined the Stayfun family last month. As a graduation present for Natasja, and in the knowledge that she would probably be starting a new job soon and doing a lot of travelling, I opted for the Creative Zen Nano Plus 1GB. Not through loyalty to Creative or anything of the sort. I still do my rigorous research when looking to purchase any elements of technology. It just seemed to fit the bill of having a reasonable capacity, a host of cool features that might be handy, like voice recording, a line-in and FM radio, and primarily it’s tiny, which is ideal for her to carry around.

So over the past couple of weeks it’s been getting used and so far it seems pretty good. The limited capacity doesn’t suit my personal listening habits – I like to carry all the key albums from my collection, as well as a lot of new stuff to try out – but for what it is, it’s another Creative product I’m really happy with. And while the FM radio could be seen as a gimmick, I’ve actually found it achieves better reception in my home than my DVD player which has an aerial attached.

Possibly irrelevant to most of the people who read here, I just wanted to write an entry about webhosting (all part of the diversification of Stayfun). The change in hosting that I made earlier in January was long overdue. In fact it was something I planned in January 2005, only I was misinformed by the old host, who then went and charged for another year of hosting well before the previous deal had expired. With one thing after another, I eventually settled with the status quo.

That hosting company was Nevidia. As I type this, their site isn’t even accessible, and that says a lot. What I do remember of their homepage is that it was a garish flash site that inflicts horrible streaming video and audio on you without an option to escape. They even used some fancy control panel software that was only compatible with Internet Explorer. But it wasn’t always that way. In fact, when I first joined with them they seemed ideal. They offered ASP-friendly Windows hosting at a fair price, and they were small and friendly.

Sometimes I would contact their technical support and receive an instant response (a couple of times drunkenly in the middle of their night). I liked that. They seemed to care and would actually listen to me.

Unfortunately at some point during that first year they altered their package details and raised the price. Although that didn’t affect my contract, from that point the company went downhill. The servers were frequently offline. Sometimes my website no longer seemed to exist. Other times I would have visible Windows server errors for up to 12 hours until a server was reset. I would lose emails, and amazingly, at one point last year while abroad and depending on webmail, everything in the inboxes of all my accounts was mysteriously wiped.

Technology problems are one thing, and to be honest, over the last six months of my contract I did have a lot less issues with their servers. But the one key thing that I could never forgive was the lapse of their customer service. I can appreciate that replying to emails all day can be terribly boring, especially if being asked stupid questions over and over. However, I always try to write support emails with care, step-by-step, spelling out what is wrong in the hope that the reader actually understands. Yet instead of the immediate caring responses, I was then subjected to long delays before finally a one line standard response would arrive, completely ignoring everything I said. That always drives me insane, and dealing with Nevidia customer support would always turn into a battle of wills, a fight to get a reasonable response before my spirit was destroyed. And with friends also using their hosting, it wasn’t just me enduring that pain.

So now I’m with Streamline.Net. I’ve had one friend with them for a couple of years, plus they also host the Aereogramme site I designed last year. Neither have had any problems to date, and after two weeks of my new contract, their server has been reliable and customer support fairly decent. For now I am at peace with webhosts.