PG applications: weekend round-up

So, three are fully submitted and under consideration (Abertay asked for two references but apparently they're happy to proceed with just one).

Three are awaiting verification of references, which I guess means contacting the people who supplied them and checking that they did actually supply them to me.

Two are still waiting for one reference; not from the same person, but from people I've pinged several times over the last month. If I don't hear anything from those folks early next week, I'm forgetting them and sending in different references--I have a couple in hand now to substitute.

Apart from those I guess it's just down to waiting to hear at this point. Rather startling to think that I could be matriculating in just four months if one of these comes through.

i-apps

I realise that, after joining the i-tech revolution when I bought my iPod Touch, I haven't really embraced app madness. I've downloaded probably less than a dozen apps (one for birding--the main reason I got the iTouch--one for football news, one for Metro maps and another for National Park maps, a couple for reading, one or two games). What are my readers' favourite apps? What else should I get?

Also, on the subject of things electronic, I have some music on my iThing, but anything there has to be bought from iTunes (which I try not to do, because I like having the CD itself to fall back on) or first burned to my laptop from CD and then transferred, the first of which is a big chore. That made me wonder; I gather from the popular press that actually buying recorded media is a concept swiftly going out of style. But to me it just makes sense. If I buy everything online and then have a drive crash, it's lost forever! At first I thought one could just go back to iTunes and reload it, but one of my friends who had that experience came in for a nasty shock--he had to pay for everything all over again! As far as Apple was concerned, they might have a record of what he had purchased before, but if he wanted to make use of it again, he had to buy it again. Do people really download all or most of their music? Do they spend their entire lives backing up drives? That seems like an awful lot of effort. Also, another of my friends found that a song she purchased could only be stored on a limited number of drives before it could no longer be copied. I can see that making sense from a copyright point of view, but it seems tough in this world where people are constantly changing machines, i-devices, etc.