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Cnet's Top 10 Must Have Gadgets

Man, I know I'm a gadget geek, but I'm almost embarrassed that I own the top 3 items on this list, and own one more if you count my TiVo series one.

I've had my iPod for almost a year now, and in that time I've gotten more unsolicited comments on it than on anything else I've ever owned. Here are my top three random iPod encounters:

1. After one of my first discussion sections of the semester, a cute girl asked me, "Is your iPod one of the new ones with the solid state track wheels?"

   Not expecting that question at all, I fumbled my response, and ended up saying something like "Er, uh, no, look, an original one, wheel."

   I held it out for her, and she reached out and spun the wheel. "Oh," she said, sounding almost disappointed.

   Between her being cute, her asking about my iPod, and her owning an iBook, I admit I was disappointed when I found out she had a boyfriend. But at least it came up in random conversation the next week before I had a chance to put myself in an embarrassing situation.

2. While standing in line to see Gigantic last spring, I took my iPod out to play a song for my friend.

   While the song was playing, I overheard a guy in line behind me say "Wow, I suddenly want to shake his hand, and say 'Wow, I wish I had money to buy an iPod.'"

   His friend told him "You should." But he didn't. I pretended I didn't hear them, and went right on talking to my friend.

   But when it was announced the venue was 21 and over, the kids behind me, along with many others in the line, were left in a lurch. Hell, I didn't know it was 21 and over either -- I didn't see anything about it on the website or in the email confirmation.

   I felt kind of bad for them when they wandered away from the line dejectedly, but what was I supposed to do? Give him my iPod ID as a consolation prize?

3. During a pick-up game of Set at a BART station while waiting with some friends, some random guy started watching us play and trying to strike up a conversation. When the train showed up, the guy got on and sat down altogether too close to us.

   At some point, I transfered my iPod from my pocket to my backpack or something, and the guy latched onto that and attempted to pick the conversation back up.

   I'm pretty sure he was more interested in my beautiful companions than me or my iPod.

   I tried to wrap the conversation up as quickly as possible, but not before he gave us his web site address for "his music." It was hosted at eristocracy.net or something else containing a too clever pun on the name eris.

   Thankfully, he got off a couple of stops later, so we didn't have to ride with him the whole way.

Anyway, those are just the three that stand out the most in my mind for one reason or another. Besides that, there were three incidents on my first round trip Amtrak ride after I got my iPod, one conversation at a party, innumerable discussions at work, and several others in class and at cafes. It's quite the conversation piece.

I can only hope the TiBook I plan to buy next month works out half as well for me.

My anticipation for the iPod was really amazing. For a year and a half music hasn't exactly been fun. I would occasionally buy a CD, and then I would rip it and put it on my Rio. Eventually I'd get tired of it and I'd assemble a new playlist composed of things I knew I liked, and that was that. I don't listen to music except when I'm walking, and putting new music on my Rio was a lot harder than just changing a CD in a discman, so I just didn't really expose myself to much new music. I didn't even bother to listen to a lot of the music I own. It was just too much effort.

I own nearly 300 CDs, and in any one month I probably listened to songs off of maybe 10 of them. But as my anticipation of getting an iPod grew, I realized that I had a lot of music just sitting around that wasn't ready. So I ripped a lot of my old CDs that I hadn't ripped before. I dug out my CDs of archived TMBG bootlegs and other assorted mp3s. And I copied them all onto my laptop, and organized them, and prepared playlists for my iPod.

And I had more fun in those couple of days of menially ripping CDs and moving files around than I've had with music in years. And that was before I even got my iPod.

After the yummy sandwich that this weekend was, I got iPod iCe Cream on Monday.

So uhm, somehow my shipping magically got converted into FedEx priority overnight, and I didn't pay extra for it! Which is good for me, but bad for my co-worker who did pay extra.

So uhm, my Gamecube was loaded onto a FedEx truck at 8:04 am in Emeryville, "to be delivered today". So was my roommate's. The complicated part is that his is to be delivered to the apartment, while mine is going to my office. So I'm going to hedge my bets on someone being at my office and wait at the apartment for now. Besides, I'm waiting on my Laundry. Of course, this is silly of me, since he just forbade me from opening his package, so really, I should go to work and make sure I get my Gamecube. But if I go to work, then I have a meeting at 1, and I don't want to make 2 extra trips between the office and here today, since I've already made too many trips today. And if I'm at the office, I won't be able to play my Gamecube until I get home after 2 anyway, which is about when my roommate will get home, so...

Ack, so many choices! And the sad thing is, all the choices seem to add up to the same result: No playing is going to happen until after 2 or so.

My roommate's reaction when I told him that my package was on the truck when he stepped out of the bathroom: "Oh no!!! I have a test tomorrow, I can't play it!" Heh.

Oh, and uh, in other news, my iPod also shipped Yesterday (or today, depending on where you are, thanks to interesting properties of the international date line), so I'll probably get it Monday, just in time for a long train ride. And just in time to use it to back up my dad's computer in its capacity as a hard drive.

I tend to make one trip to the music store about once a month, and on that trip, I'll buy 4-8 CDs. And then I'll rip them, and then I'll listen to the whole glob of them on shuffle, and then one of two things will happen. I will either put two of the albums on my rio, and neglect the rest of them for evermore, or I will be too tired of disc shuffling and file organizing to feel anything like preparing a new playlist and neglect all of the music I just bought.

An iPod would solve all of this, and buying music wouldn't be such a stupid thing for me to do.

What motivates this post? I bought music today. The winners include:

• The Incredible Moses Leroy - Electric Pocket Radio
• Aphex Twin - Drukqs
• Enigma - Enigma 3/ Le Roi Est Mort, VIVE Le Roi!
• Moxy Fruvous - Bargainville
• Barenaked Ladies - Rock Spectacle

There's five hours of music here. To narrow it down to fit on my Rio I'd have to pick about 1/4 of the music, and I'd just do it at random... Bah, I need an iPod.

And if you're wondering why I'm only now realizing how much my Rio doesn't meet my needs, it's because before the iPod, no other mp3 player met my needs, either. The iPod is the first device to meet my storage/size ratio desires, even if the price is a little off.

But. Size, Price, Performance. Pick any two.

It's been nearly a week since the iPod was announced, and the more I've thought about it, the more convinced I've become that it will solve of my music woes.

What are my music woes, exactly? Well, most of the time I only listen to music when I'm walking somewhere. When I'm at home, I'll either listen to the TV in the background while doing something not-so-important or I need silence while doing something a little more important. So I've got a Rio 500, with a total of 128 megabytes of memory. If I shuffled my music regularly, this would be a more than adequate amount of storage.

Now, if I listened to music with iTunes regularly, I'd probably gradually queue up songs to transfer to the Rio, and when the music on the Rio got tired I'd have some new tunes ready to put into the rotation. But I don't listen to music with iTunes, which means that changing the music on my Rio is both a time consuming and frustrating prospect.

Here's my work flow when I'm updating the music on my Rio:

1. Reconstruct the playlists that currently on the Rio.
2. Delete the songs that I'm absolutely sick of.
3. Add songs that I've thought about in the last couple of days that I wanted to listen to.
4. Start scrolling at random through my iTunes playlist and adding any songs that catch my eye until each playlists is at about 63 megs.
5. Sort the two playlists so that they'll both fit on the memory cards (it's not a contiguous 128 megs -- it's two separate 64 megs)
6. Wait about a couple of minutes for iTunes to erase the Rio.
7. Wait about five minutes for each playlist to copy to the Rio.
8. Hope that the playlists weren't too big, because iTunes doesn't preflight the copy by making sure that the music will actually fit on the Rio, and when it tries to copy too much music the Rio, iTunes, or my USB bus (I don't know which) gets wedged and I have to restart both my computer and my Rio and try the copy again, after resorting the music trying to make both playlists smaller.

In other words, it's a very time consuming process, that usually takes me about an hour to do. In fact, it's so time consuming, and I hate doing it so much, that I haven't changed the music on my Rio since I got my PowerBook back (However, changing the music on my Rio was the third thing I did when I got my PowerBook back. I'd been stuck with the same playlist on my Rio for the 3.5 weeks I didn't have the PowerBook plus the 4 weeks before I broke the PowerBook, and I was going Absolutely Cuckoo).

So I've been listening to the same combination of Cake, Weezer, Soul Coughing, TMBG, and The Magnetic Fields for more than a month now, and I'm getting very tired of it. And to make matters worse, the last couple of nights while up late I started listening to music with iTunes instead of watching TV, and I noticed for the first time that I've only been listening to the same 3% of my music for the last month.

It was that realization that really cemented in my mind that I need an iPod. With an iPod, my music rotation process would be simply:

1. Plug iPod into PowerBook before I go to sleep so it can charge.
2. Unplug iPod the next morning and I'll magically have my new music if I'd added any to my iTunes playlist.

Basically, it's the integration and simplification that the iPod gets me that I'm sold on. I'd buy an iPod if it had the same capacity as my Rio as long as it had the same synchronization functions (Well, it'd have to sync a random playlist instead of everything. And there are some other features I'd like to see on the iPod, which Kevin talked about at length (I don't want exactly what he describes, but there are good ideas to be had).)

The point is, an iPod is going to make my music life much happier. Hmm... I wonder how much of the mood I've been in for the last month is direct related to the songs I've had on my Rio for the last month... Did I mention to it every day, everywhere I walk?

Of course, I could probably dampen my desire for an iPod by simply rotating my Rio playlist... But I'm not sure I want to make myself not want an iPod at this point.

Wow, this is really nice. It turns out that the iPod has an easter egg in the form of a hidden game of breakout (accessible by holding the center button for several seconds on the about screen). This is especially cool because breakout's historical significance for Apple.

And on the subject of the iPod, here's a nice article discussing the situation.

And at this point, I'm more or less sold on getting one. I can't wait.

Today, Apple introduced the iPod. Let's get the problems I have with the iPod out of the way first:

1. Apple over-hyped it as being a "revolutionary digital device," but it's just an mp3 player. Admittedly, it's a damn good mp3 player, but it's just an mp3 player all the same.
2. The name "iPod" is a lot stupid.
3. It doesn't have the ability to record audio.
4. It doesn't ship for 3-4 weeks.
5. And it's going to set me back $400.

Yeah, I'm already sold on this as being a replacement for my aging Rio 500. What does the iPod do above and beyond my Rio?

1. Well, it's got something like 40 times the storage of my Rio (80 if you don't count the external memory I added).
2. It has a built in battery, so I'll stop blowing money on AAs.
3. It automatically syncs with iTunes. I update the 128 megs in my Rio something like once a month, just because it's such a pain (USB is ass slow, and picking out 128 megs of mp3s from my many many gigs usually takes me about an hour). Not only would iPod mean more music for me, but it would mean more regularly updated music for me.
4. It's got a much bigger screen with a better and more featureful interface.
5. All that, and it's only about .5 an inch bigger taller than my Rio, .03 of an inch thicker, and .07 of an inch narrower.
6. The iTunes 2 icon is incredibly subtle and cool.
7. And in all honesty, it's Apple.

The only reason I didn't order an iPod today is because it doesn't ship for 3-4 weeks, and I suppose that delay gives me plenty of time to decide how important audio recording really is to me. For just playing music as I walk between classes, etc, the iPod wins hands down.

And to make matters worse, last week Apple feature bumped the PowerBook G4 and the iBook. The machines were so updated, in fact, that if these revisions had been available a month ago, I would have probably bought one instead of getting my PowerBook fixed. In fact, if I hadn't had to pay $800 to get my PowerBook fixed a month ago, I'd be seriously considering buying one of these machines right now. But, that $800 investment I made in my PowerBook G3 means that I'm going to force myself to wait at least one more revision before I actually upgrade.

So, what's so great about these revisions? Well, the iBook is not only up to 600 mhz, but it also finally features a 100 mhz bus! But that's nothing compared to what they did to the TiBook... Well, let's look at the $2999 model. Above and beyond the previous top of the line the 500 mhz TiBook, the system comes with a 133mhz system bus, a 667 mhz processor, a larger battery, a better power supply, a better graphics card, more video memory, way more system memory, gigabit ethernet, and a bigger hard drive. The only, and I repeat only thing that I can't get in that system is a combo DVD/CDRW drive, and that's something that I expect the next revision to have. But that $2999 TiBook is quite a powerful machine at quite a good price. And the TiBook now offers enough of an upgrade over my Pismo that I'd be willing to give up my dual batteries for the increased power.

So. No laptop upgrade. I'd love to upgrade, but I'm exercising will power here, and forcing myself to hold out for the next revision. But! I'm 90% sure I'll be getting an iPod once they ship. And conveniently, I'll probably be able to sell my Rio 500 to subsidize the purchase. =)

Or hm, maybe I should wait for the first iPod revision... Ah, decisions!

Good god, this is just surreal. I read this article on Gamers.com about the newly available... Game Gear? Hey, cool, you can buy a Game Gear from Amazon for only $30! By the time you buy a couple games for $10 apiece, you can actually get a pretty good deal on some classic games.

I used to have a Game Gear -- I chose to get it instead of a Game Gear instead of a Game Boy back when I was about 12... It sucked batteries like I had no intention of playing it in an hour, and that was really only the bad thing about it. I enjoyed a lot of games on the system, it had a beautiful screen, and it was a shame that Sega stopped supporting it. They just couldn't compete with the Game Boy on price, though now they obviously can.

Yesterday Dale Earnhardt Sr died. I found out while sitting on my couch watching TV -- not because the TV said something, but because I was browsing on my laptop. Wirelessly. Which made me realize that this is the second famous person in the last year I\'ve found out has died while I was using wireless internet.

I found out about the death Charles Schulz a year and a week before I found out about Dale Earnhardt.

I had just got my OmniSky modem, and was playing with it while riding a campus shuttle. I was having a good old time, when I decided to read the news, only to discover that Charles Schulz had died, before his final strip ran. I quietly put my wireless palm pilot away and sat in silence for the rest of the trip.

Hey, slick, I can send and receive e-mail on my cell phone. I wonder how much extra I'm paying for that. It's probably the guy told me I got for free for two months and had to pay for after that. It's still really cool, even if it's a nightmare to type anything on the phone. It took me a couple of minutes just to peck out my e-mail address. I wonder if phone makers have considered making phones that put vowels as the first character on the key, and order the letters on each key by how frequently they're used?

Anyway, I noticed the "send e-mail" menu option while I was poking around trying to change my start up screen from "Welcome to AT&T" to something better, like "Bingley Bingley Bop!"