Entry 163 - PodWatch 2005

PodWatch 2005

The annual non-faith-specific gift-giving period is pretty much over for this fiscal year, and, seeing as how I spent a load on gifts for others this go ‘round, I figure the few hundred I had left over in the budget should buy me (me! me! me!) something quite pointless and quite novel, and so incredibly ridiculously trendy that it makes my head hurt ever so slightly. "Hey!" I said to myself, "I like music! I like technology!"

Well–In accordance with my own secret wishlist and a subsequent oversight on Chanukkah Harry’s part (snub!), I decided this past Mondee to gank a Thirty Gigabyte Fifth Generation iPod with Video Playback from the Apple.com Store… complete with personalized engraving and a handful of other ass-essories to make my podding experience richer. I got a Speck Toughskin™ shell, a pair of nifty Sony headphones, and a cassette adapter for Willis (my truck). I laid out 13 extra bones for FedEx’s “2day Shipping”, of course. What Apple failed to mention in their glossy sales pitch, however, is that this magical mystical 2-day shipping applies to items that ‘exist’ within CONUS; so if say, iPods were manufactured, assembled, and customized in Shanghai, PRC, I’d have to wait until myPod was in Oregon or California to start the clock. Pfft. Tricky bastards.

So here it sits, my lonely rubberized iPod sleeve, along with it’s friends the Sony headphones and the cassette adapter, waiting for the JoshPod to show up so I can load it down with Bluegrass and System of a Down and Terry Pratchett books — or some of the other 80+ Gigs of “media” I have floating around on my network. I can say this about the headphones: besides feeling initially quite bizarre (the first 10 minutes or so) stuffed in your ears, they reproduce quite an amazing range.

And yeah, I went with the black iPod. The white is so teh ghey c. 2005.

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