Short entry tonight, but I did wanna make a note of an excitin' early Christmas present I got from my brother over the weekend -- a crazy little Chinese-made MP4 player.

Now, this aint a high-end device, necessarily; to be honest, after three days of futzing with the player itself and looking through the amusing-though-otherwise-incomprehensible instruction manual, I still have absolutely no idea who manufactured the little booger. It did come with a "Guarantee" card which you are supposed to fill out and hold onto -- not that you really have a choice, because it does NOT include an address or company name to send the Guarantee card to. I guess it kind of operates under the same logic as a security blanket.

However -- anonymity aside, this is actually a fairly versatile device, sporting a serviceable 1.5" screen, built-in speaker, SD card slot, TV out, and -- something you don't see on many American-made media players -- A/V line-in recording, which is pretty darned awesome. I'm watching an episode of 'The Office' on it right now, as a matter o' fact.

Oh, and it says 'Bye Bye' when you power it off. China, yeesh.

I guess this post isn't especially clever or funny, so to make up for it, here, verbatim, are the conditions of the guarantee card, which were apparently run through Babelfish from Cantonese to English to Swahili and back to English:

Guarantee Item:

1. 1 month upon date of purchase. if there is function pr problem, we should offer the same item subject to goods and packing maintain prefect.

2. 1 year upon date of purchase, we will guarantee to deep the goods in repair. (mot including fittings).

3. Guarantee server is suject to normally using.

4. All of damage by man-made ()tear open the housing, tear off the sticker, unnormally using, or losing this card, we will not guarantee.

You're in good hands.