Present #1

Looks like, as far as presents go, this is shaping up to be the best birthday ever! Earlier this week Anne gave me the choice between a new pair of skates, a new audio deck for the Rav, or tickets to a Leaf game. I choose the the audio deck. Here is what I bought myself :

I got the Alpine CDA-9826, which is the model right below this one and differs by not having a remote and only one pre-out, but feature and quality-wise is exactly the same. It soooo much better than the one that came with our RAV; even Anne noticed an immediate difference in the quality of the sound. An added bonus is that we get in way more radio stations too, I had no idea so many were available in this area. It's XM ready as well which is something that I would like to get at some point in the future as well. It also has a feature called MediaXpander which cleans up Radio and MP3s and fills in missing sound to bring it up to CD-like quality. So I am VERY pleased with this purchase. Did I mention how much I love my wife :)
Also, this afternoon I managed to install it all by myself which I didn't know I could do. It really is amazing how my computer skills, in this case all the wiring stuff I do, run into so many other areas of life.