Toy review

I did eventually get my iPod the other day. Actually, within about 20 minutes of posting this entry, I noticed a car in my neighbour's driveway, and wandered over to get my package, which was no longer hypothetical. I ran home and opened the box like a kid on Christmas morning. Is niiiiiiice. But holy crap, is that thing ever small. My wife has a little 512MB MP3 player that she uses for early morning walks, and it holds lots of songs, but she still has to refill it occasionally because she's bored of the music on it. The iPod, which is not much bigger (and when it's strapped to your arm is probably insignificantly bigger), holds 160 times as much stuff.

I'd ripped a bunch of my CDs to MP3 because of the MP3 player in my car, but they used various ripping programs (some of which are better quality than others), and use different (probably fairly low) bitrates and such, so I decided to start from scratch and just rip everything with iTunes. I've only done maybe 10 albums so far, so there's not much on there yet. I found a cable that I can use to attach to my car stereo, and this morning on my way to work, I listened to a podcast of yesterday's Prime Time Sports, "the nation's most listened-to sports talk presentation". I generally like listening to this show (live) on my way home, but because it's over AM radio (ugh), the reception isn't always the clearest, and I can't listen to AM radio and charge my cell phone in the car at the same time because of all the interference from the charger. Now I'll be listening a day behind, but the sound is crystal clear, there's no interference, I can skip bits if they start talking about football or something else I'm not interested in, I don't miss anything if I stop to get gas or if I get home right in the middle of an interesting topic, it's awesome. This is not even mentioning the fact that now I'll be able to listen to programs from radio stations that I can't even get, or (gasp) actual podcasts that are not simply recordings of radio programs. And soon (well, probably several weeks from now once I get everything ripped), I'll have my entire music collection with me as well.

I haven't even had the thing a week and already I'm wondering how I lived without it.