When I returned from lunch at work on Friday, there was a smallish, square box sitting on my desk. The return address was my friend Otter. I knew what had to be in it because he'd told me it was coming, but I didn't really believe it: a 4Gig black iPod Nano.
!!!!
I took it to open in front of my co-workers, because I was so excited I couldn't not share the fun. I slowly opened everything - even the BOX has an amazing design - and when I unfolded the inner piece and saw it sitting there in all its diminutive glory, I squealed and closed it again. It's so TINY! Everybody ooohed and aaahed satisfactorily, although I did get two "what's an iPod?"s that made me wonder who these people were and when would the aliens call them back to the mother ship.
One co-worker instantly began hating his iRiver and determined to hawk it and get a nano, at a loss of 1Gig space, just because it was so very small and sexy. I tried to talk him out of it, explaining that Otter and his friend between them contrived some sort of miracle discount at Apple to get this for me, and he has a pregnant wife and child he has to feed and a broken car he has to fix, but to no avail: he MUST have a nano.
When I got it home, I had to explain it to my parents, which went something like this:
Me: It plays music.
My Parents: But what does it play?
Me: Music? MP3 files. Music.
My Parents: No, but what does it play? Like tapes or CDs or what?
Me: MP3 files. Like on the computer. They're files.
My Parents: I don't understand.
ad infinitem...
Finally I tried explaining what MP3 files were by likening them to picture files, wherein a photo on the computer has information that tells the computer to show it as a picture, while an mp3 file has information that tells the computer to play it as a song. Oh, and that an iPod is a wee little computer.
I THINK they got it.
Anyway, I got a pile of music on there - some from my own collection and some from my brother's - and discovered that it is nigh on impossible to get music OFF of an iPod onto a PC. The hell? I imagine it was to keep us from doing exactly what we were trying to do - share music - but I am disappointed, because I expected to be able to use it as a hard drive to take music from my home computer into my office computer. You CAN use it as a disk drive, but I havent' figured that part out just yet. Hopefully I will soon.
In any case, every time I see it I want to take it for a walk, which is just fitting in fabulously with my Birthday Plan.
Things that do not fit in with my Birthday Plan: chocolate-covered pretzels, and landing a web / logo / stationery design job that is due directly on my birthday, with a half-busted computer. Eek.
Posted by nightingayle at January 8, 2006 10:57 AM