Temptation of Consumerism

I am very tempted to get a camcorder. Should I?

The thing is, I have the dubious joy of fielding course conflicts almost every term. Lacking something like Hermione's hourglass, I usually get away with this by recording the lectures I skipped*. Unfortunately, I have a voice recorder. A cheap one, with cassette tapes (yes, they still exist!) that can record for exactly one hour and no more. So, if I time things wrong and set up the recorder too early, I'll miss some of the lecture. And I'll be late for the class I plan to attend unless the conflicted classes are in the same building.

The system kind of worked last term because the conflicted courses are one floor away from each other, and one of them is organic chemistry. This means I can look things up if needed be - I mean, things like reaction mechanisms are generally well-known, and well-described by textbooks. The same cannot be said for linear algebra proofs, however. Just listening to a math professor isn't helpful at all when the blackboard** is absent (what are the entries of "this matrix A"?), and textbooks generally are of limited utility***.

Hence the temptation for a camcorder: I can set it up a little earlier, and most importantly, I'll actually be able to see the blackboard.

On the other hand, a decent camcorder is extremely expensive from a student's point of view. My work term salary all goes into tuition and books and rent. My wages from destroying marking assignments will just barely cover it, but I'd rather use that money for food. In addition, the camcorder will be left unattended for an hour at least twice a week - the probability that someone will steal it is very high.

Last but not the least, if assignments are handed out only during lectures, or if I have three simultaneous course conflicts (which I am hoping to avoid!), a camcorder won't save me anyway.

*Normal people would ask their friends for notes, instead. This, unfortunately, assumes that one has friends.
**Quite a few of my math professors are traditionalists; they like blackboards better than whiteboards. Naturally, nobody lectures with Powerpoint.
***Math textbooks have an unfortunate tendency to use the phrase "this is left as an exercise [for the reader]".