My iPod is dead, long live my iPod

A couple of years ago, Christmas 2004, to be exact, my wonderful wife bought me a 20 Gb audio-only 4th-generation iPod. It was a wonderful treat. I spent January of 2005 loading most of my favorite CDs onto it, and then began to wonder what the fuss was all about.

A Google search or two for “iPod” kept kicking up links to something called “podcasting.” I explored further, and my life was changed. I became a member of the second wave of podcasting, and I podcast to this day.

Last night, my iPod slipped off a table and hit the floor. This had happened a couple times before, but last night did it in. The impact must have been hard enough to really knock something loose inside, because it is truly dead. Docking it to my computer does nothing. Sliding the “hold” switch does nothing. Pressing the buttons does nothing. There are ways to fix these things, but I’m not quite enough of a gadget geek to do it.

So today I am listening to my morning drive-time podcasts on a Creative MuVo MP3 player. It works fine, but it’s not the same. I went to the iTunes Music Store and downloaded a few tracks of the Bach piece my church choir is singing in a couple weeks. But almost the instant I paid for them, I realized I have no portable player on which to play them. (Thanks, Apple, for such a robust DRM scheme…grrrrr!)

So my wonderful wife (to whom I gave a video iPod for her birthday last year) promised to take me to the local Apple store this weekend for an early Father’s Day present. I’ll finally move into the video iPod world.

Too bad, in a way, because that 20 Gb drive was just about right for me. It forced me to dump old podcasts once I had heard them, and it made me think about what music was really important enough to carry around with me. And I’m not sure when I’m going to look at a little video screen to watch a movie–although I’ll probably figure that out.