I don’t know if I’ve mentioned it, but Amanda’s a very high-tech geek jeep.

Other than the standard Jeepish fare, like a 4×4 drive that we dare not touch, cruise control for those endless interstate highways and a throaty growl to keep unwary motorists at bay, we have outfitted Amanda with some new additions:

1) A 12Volt connector (in addition to the cigarette lighter) gives juice to an AC/DC inverter, giving us a fully-featured electrical socket in the car. We use it to recharge our cellphones when it’s not busy feeding the hungry hungry laptop.

 2) Amanda’s stereo reads CDs all right, but normal audio CDs are SO old fashioned these days. Since it won’t read MP3s and has no line-in connector, we had to make do with roundabout approaches: an FM transmitter is hooked up to the MP3 player or to the MP3 discman, trasmitting it to 87.1FM and caught by the car’s radio. It’s looped up on the passenger side handgrip for maximum antenna accessibility:

That’s the news from the tech front.