bambooneedle wrote:Otis, do/did you find it easy to talk with portuguese people? I do here as my spanish is limited so I keep it kind of basic and if I get stuck I can resort to english.
The best way to use shuffle is not give it any bad or average songs to chose from - eg. the cdrs for my car stereo that I put up to 150 songs on.
The level of English in Portugal was always a lot better in Spain and given that they mostly hate the Spanish, it would have felt offensive using it with them, so I got by with English generally, and learnt the basics for restaurants etc. where it didn't work. I remember a Catalan colleague speaking to them in his native tongue which they welcomed, and which was easy for them to understand. In Brazil I've generally been with local folk or again, used English, but on occasion I have used an absurd hybrid where I remember 'çao' for ción' and stuff, most memorably during a 20 min taxi ride where we managed to put across our respective opinions on the then emerging Beckham, etc.
I've definitely got some average stuff on my iPod, just because it has 80gb and I wanted my entire collection on there. The ratio of excellent to average is very high. The way it keeps me in touch with parts of the collection I might otherwise overlook is wonderful. It has a curious habit of selecting Costello bonus CD numbers over original CD ones!