iPod schmiPod Revisited

On the 11th I noted that the borg have made inroads on my consciousness and I now own an iPod.  Norm Jenson linked to that post and sent hundreds of his readers over here to see if I’d written anything funny.  Not.  Same boring crap.  Boring but consistent.  It happens here most every day whether or not I say anything important. 

Whenever I get a link from Norm I’m reminded that blogging is something that can be done well.  Norm does it well.  He has a perspective on politics and religion that he voices in tones ranging from the wryly humorous to total outrage.  He has a blog format that’s consistent, presenting video clips from comedians like Boxcar to serious journalists like Jon Stewart.  His links are usually worth following which is why so many of his readers turn up the blind alley into these parts when he is kind enough to link here.

Norm was ready to upgrade his toolset, and he bought into the current high-end of Apple tech.  His new iMac G5 will process those media clips twice as fast, take up very little space on or around his desk, and with a 400GB hard drive, it makes guys like me breathe a little faster.  That said, Apple combines three of the several elements that comprise the core of Norm’s blog, namely politics, religion, and technology, so when Norm pointed to my conversion to iPodistry there emerged a brief but intense discussion in the comment thread beneath the post.  (Incidentally, it should be noted that comparing the iPod to the iMac is a little like comparing a Tonka toy truck to a new Mercedes).

Anyway, I thought it was time for the iPod update… a moment when anyone interested can check in on my status as a convert to the religion of Jobs.  I stuffed it in my pocket yesterday and enjoyed it on a
long plane ride. Great battery life, all the user interface convenience
you expect from Apple gear. And since I had a Sony noise canceling head-set I didn’t need to suffer four hours of ear bud rapine discomfort.  I was loving it until I discovered that some pocket change had scratched the heck out
of the faceplate. Clarity of the display is important on this particular unit because reading notes in tiny type and displaying
images were a couple of the added features that convinced me to buy it.  I was a little peeved at myself for being so careless. Still,
I thought, what could a new faceplate cost?

Luckily, I’m in Palo Alto and the atmosphere of Apple enthusiasm here is probably a match for the feelings around total immersion baptism in Oklahoma.  Not everybody is into it, but if you are, you have a lot of positivge reinforcement.  I stopped in the Stanford Shopping Center retail Apple store.  We’re talking about a store that is very near the Apple mother ship here in
Silicon Valley, a store with heavy upscale pretensions, a store where the staff are as much priests and acolytes as retail service personnel.  This store is in a shopping center where Nordstrom’s is the low end anchor store, serving the budget minded who can’t afford Bloomies or Neiman Marcus at the other end of the mall.  It was there, in the Apple store, that I learned that the repair isn’t possible, that the cost
would be the same as the cost of a new unit since they would actually just swap out the unit for a new one.  It was there that I learned that my 30GB hard drive multimedia appliance with the cute white earbuds is a "consumable." 

Naturally my mistreatment of the unit isn’t covered by the warranty.