Hey, Revolution! Wait Up!

I have this perverse streak in me that prevents me from enjoying popular things, simply on the grounds that they are popular. The more popular they get, the more I'm likely to dig in my heels. This usually means you'll find heel marks in the technology sand as I'm dragged into the future. Where Tomorrow Beach intersects with the Ocean of Popular Culture, that's where those heel marks are most pronounced. Oh, I'll do things, buy things, in my own good time, for my own good reasons. I don't consider the fact that millions of other humans are doing something to be sufficient reason unto itself for me to join in. Commit suicide, goes the old saying. Ten billion lemmings can't be wrong.
Examples? Well, J.K. Rowling had published three books about a certain boy wizard before I'd deigned to read even one. I haven't seen so much as a single episode of--well, you name the popular show. House, say. Survivor. (Although I heard somewhere the ratings on that are starting to tank, and I'm fiercely grateful for the increase in humanity's collective IQ that portends). American (Canadian, British, Uzbekistani) Idol . Grey's Anatomy. And so on.
I only recently got an mp3 player, having poo-pooed them in the past. I'm still kind of iffy on cell phones, even though we have one of those now, too.
Of course, I'm as big a Harry Potter fan as the next man, now...although I still kind of wish I'd held off until, say, this July before I dove headfirst into that particular pool, if only so I could have read all the books in succession without these annoying year or more gaps. Television? I might watch House, after the masses have moved on to something else--I've nothing against the show itself other than its absurd popularity. But you'll never catch me in front of Survivor, not until it has something to do with actual survival. Nor any of the Idols. You'd think I'd enjoy those shows, as I'm a pretty musical kind of guy, but no. Not as long as they employ people to eviscerate contestants on stage for daring to get up and sing for an audience of six and a half squillion. And not so long as they rely on those six and half squillion people to act as judges of talent. The mere existence of websites like http://www.votefortheworst.com/ pretty much confirms my low opinion of this practice, don't you think?

MP3 players, now. I'm a convert.

Eva bought me a little 1 GB Ipod knockoff (something called an ERi) for the commute to work. I held off on using it much through the winter, not sure how to comfortably wear headphones under a toque, but once I started in on these night shifts the thing has been a godsend.
Of course, the god involved turned capricious pretty quickly. Just my second night in, the player suddenly died out mid-song on me. Battery's dead, I thought. Two hours later, weary of the satellite radio, I checked it again. This is a quirk of mine, a quirk that works, more often than not. I keep pens that run dry, because in half an hour they'll work again. I turn off the television in disgust if the Maple Leafs are losing badly, and if I turn it on again ten minutes later, sometimes they've clawed their way back into a game.
Worked fine. For about 45 minutes. Then it happened again.
Undaunted, I came home that morning and changed the battery for one freshly charged. Left the house that night, bopping along to our wedding recessional...and before I'd even made it to work the bloody thing died again. I kept trying it through the night, and it worked every time, but for progressively shorter and shorter intervals. I'm sure my night crew-mates appreciated my singing along...

Once I was the King of Spain (now I eat humble pie)
Oh, my unspeakable wife, Queen Lisa (now I eat humble pie)
I'm telling you, I was the King of Spain (now I eat--) zzzut!
SHIT!!!

"Hey, Ken, quit eating shit over there!"
"Sorry. Damn mp3 player died on me AGAIN!"
"I had one did that. Here, let me look at it...yeah. This baby's overheated."
"So...what? Should I start spending the whole night in the freezer?"
"No offense, Ken, but this thing's kind of cheap."
"Well, I know that," I said. "My wife wanted to make sure I'd actually use the thing before she laid out tons of cash. Besides, it's not that cheap. Throw in the rechargeable batteries and it costs quite a bit, actually."
"Yeah, but those headphones cost more than the player, right?"
"Well...yeah. I'm hard on headphones. No matter how much money I spend on them, sooner or later one side or the other will short out. I'd just rather that happen next year instead of tomorrow."
"Y'oughta get an iPod."
I nodded my head at that and went back to work. Of course I oughta get an iPod, I thought darkly. Everybody else has one!
I got home from work Friday morning and went out on the Net seeking opinions. What I wanted, ideally, was a durable mp3 player with an FM tuner in case I got tired of my own music. I wasn't, actually, too keen on iPods, because I'd be a slave to iTunes--and I'd just mastered Windows Media Player; I had no real urge to learn yet another program.
Further research started to overturn my objections. It turns out iPods are popular for good reason. Several surveys have ranked the nano the most durable player out there. Also among the most easy to use. As for iTunes, it seems to be fairly intuitive. I was under the impression that you had to, gasp, buy all your content from the iTunes store. I don't know why I thought this. Maybe because Apple uses its own music format...the retailer web sites state that mp3s aren't supported. That's odd, I thought. The very definition of an mp3 player, and yet it doesn't play mp3s.

Turns out that iTunes automatically converts files from mp3 to whatever Apple calls their standard, compressing them in the process. Most importantly, I can import songs I got off SHAREZ or Limewire into iTunes and thence onto the iPod.

Another problem: iPods don't run on the same kind of batteries my ERi player uses. Cursory research seemed to indicate there are two ways to charge an iPod: through the USB port on the computer (like our computer desk isn't crowded enough) or by shelling out an obscene amount of money for something called an iPod station. Wow, I thought, Apple's really got you by the short and curlies there. That one costs $170!
Once again I was wrong. The iPod "station" is actually a full-fledged stereo system that just happens to dock an iPod. You can buy a wall adapter for a fraction of the cost.
No FM tuner, which is annoying but not a dealbreaker. I Googled "mp3 player FM tuner reviews" and kept running across durability concerns on site after site.

An iPod was looking more and more likely.

Long story slightly shorter, I am now the proud owner of an 8 GB Ipod nano. A nice black one, razor thin. It's charged but not loaded as of yet. We'll see tomorrow night how it performs.