A few things to get caught up on this Sunday:

The Sox released Doug Mirabelli this week. The man who made a career as Tim Wakefield's personal catcher was replaced by Kevin Cash, who is now the designated knuckleball receiver. The downside to this is not a great net talent loss by the Sox; Cash showed he could handle Wake just fine last season and neither player is much of a hitter at this point. The place where Douggie's loss will really be felt is in the clubhouse, where he was very popular among his teammates.

I gave up my most faithful traveling companion last week. I retired my 40GB iPod Photo. This iPod had been with me through hundreds of rides on the commuter rail, car rides, walks and plane trips over more than three years. It was utterly reliable, soaking up new podcasts, music and pictures, never crashing or giving me any headaches. It just worked. It had one drawback - despite the name, the iPod Photo's color screen was too small to really look at pictures. No real complaints, though, my iPod gave me many hours of entertainment.

I'm replacing my old iPod with a 32GB iPod Touch. A. and I have our 15th anniversary coming up later this month, and we decided we could splurge a bit this year, so that was what I decided on. Ever seen the PADDs on Star Trek? This was a gadget the crew carried around and relied on a touch screen interface to interact with the ship's computer and even play games. The iPod Touch is basically a PADD. I can access the Internet, send email, download music from the iTunes store, watch TV shows and movies and view photos on a much larger screen than my old iPod. The interface is beautiful, intuitive and fun to use. Web sites look like they look on my Mac.

Compare that to the BlackBerry I have for work, which has a hideous, thoroughly unintuitive user interface. Trying to surf the Web on the BlackBerry is an exercise in futility, or specially designed "BlackBerry friendly" Web pages.

The iPod Touch is maybe the best gadget I have ever owned. I put Superman Returns on it, so I'll get to see how watching a full length movie goes on the train this week.