Thanks to great timing (my trusty iPod mini gave up the ghost and Apple introduced its sixth-generation iPods just in time for my recent birthday), my wife treated me to a new iPod Touch today. It's slick, it's shiny, and it plays all my music just like the old one did. And it also surfs the Web — although, thanks to its absurd lack of support for Adobe Flash (Again, what the hell, Steve?), it doesn't actually reach most of the Web I use daily.

Still, its touch-screen is impressive, and it offers most of the same features as the much-cherished iPhone, without that pesky burning sensation one usually gets after a night with AT&T.

I think I like it so far, but I can't help but feel it's been hobbled at the factory: Its Calendar app doesn't actually do much more than show you a calendar (You wouldn't want to mess up that pretty calendar with any sort of input!), it doesn't allow direct access to its drive contents, and it doesn't have… well… anything on it, really. None of the mapping, stock-tracking or other application/widgets that the iPhone includes. And no games. Dang it, even the iPod 1 had Brickout.

I hear rumors that third-party apps should be coming soon, and to be fair, many people weren't even aware the stores had the iPod Touch yet, so I'm not giving up on it just yet. I'll wait to see what the community can put together for it before I really start complaining.

Meanwhile, time to migrate some music over…

It's not like me to obsess over something I cannot have (OK, so it's exactly like me to obsess over something I cannot have), but lately I've been whining that a hard-copy language reference has yet to be published for the now well-established ActionScript 3 language. Apparently, other developers have also been waiting for such a book, and today I finally decided to do something about it.

But good lord, what have I actually done?

Behold the 2,603-page ActionScript 3.0 Language Reference (and for comparison's sake, its puny 1,028-page ancestor, the ActionScript 2.0 Dictionary):"

Yep, it's the entire Language Reference — compiled and pulled from the Flash CS3 help files with the help of a custom script — and it's freaking huge. I now understand the reluctance on the part of commercial publishers: This thing is unwieldy at best. Using almost three reams of 20-pound copy paper (front and back), two 800-sheet three-ring binders and a vast majority of the stock toner cartridge in my new Brother HL-5250DN laser printer (which rocks, by the way — full duplexing for less than $200), it took way more time and effort than any sane person should spend on such a project (And sadly, I'm not counting the time I spent writing Perl code to format the pages more to my liking before pouring them into Adobe Acrobat Professional for final compilation into a single volume).

Unlike past versions of Flash, I don't think anybody can complain that the documentation hidden away in the online help files of Flash CS3 is incomplete. If it is, I'm not even sure I care.

So now that the papercuts are healing and the hole-punch confetti covers my workdesk, you're probably wondering: Will I ever actually use this tome in my daily workflow?

I'd like to believe I will, simply because I have to think I was justified in compiling it. But on the other hand, now that I've got the whole thing out of my system, there's something telling me a guy could get accustomed to this new-fangled, online HTML language reference, after all.