Ravi Zacharias International Ministries (RZIM)

One of my major interests is Christian apologetics, so as I'm exploring the whole Podcasting world, I was pretty excited to find that one of my favorite apologetic speakers, Ravi Zacharias, has his own Podcast feeds, which, if you use, are also available through iTunes.

I wasn't really surprised, as he's had downloadable audio for a couple of years now, but I was excited that I could just add his feeds to Doppler (that's the podcast aggregator I use - http://www.dopplerradio.net/) and get them automatically.

Anyway, if you're at all interested in Christian Apologetics, intelligent design, or even basic philosophical reasoning, his work is required listening. He's written some excellent books, too, naturally, and I put them right up there with C.S. Lewis. They're different, and Zacharias is not as good a writer as Lewis, but he captures the philosophical issues of our post-modern era with great clarity and personal honesty.

This brandie new 5Gb Zen Micro was partial birthday present and partial present to myself. A nice match for my new interest in Podcasts and my lifelong love of music. Plays all the file-types I’m interested in and has a 10hr voice recorder and built in condenser Mic. The sound quality on the mic is much better than I would have expected. Sound quality from the Micro is also great, of course, and 5GB really is fairly big – not that I haven’t already wished for more, mainly because I was using the “removable hard drive” feature (which I set to 1GB) to transfer a ton of digital photos from my laptop to our home computer.

After having the player for a day, I figured out that the adapter I bought years ago for a portable CD player would work great to give me some sweet tunes in my beat up old truck.

I’ve also made myself a padded metal case using an Altoids tin based on the info I found on this forum: http://www6.head-fi.org/forums/showthread.php?p=1203112 Cool stuff. Many folks are modding these tins for the Micro based on the perfect sizing. I have not gotten around to cutting a hole for jack access in the top, so I still take it out when I want to listen, but it sure beats the cloth bag for putting the thing in my bag to carry to work or wherever. I have a Dremel tool, so it’s only a matter of time. I’ll try to post a picture when it’s done.