On a business trip a few months ago, the original headphones from my first-generation iPod, purchased in January 2002, finally gave up. They hadn’t been treated too well, spending much of their time tightly bundled up in a small cloth bag, only to be taken out periodically and untangled, to flop around the desk, airport, airplane, or hotel room, then to be wound back up and put right back in the bag. Anyway, on this trip, it was during a six-hour stretch of working on a document that had to be done that day in the hotel room that I discovered the left earbud would only work if the plug was rotated to precisely the right position and the whole thing propped up just so.
I don’t remember throwing the headphones away, but I must’ve, because when I went looking for them a few days ago to give me something to listen to while riding my stationary trainer in the early morning because I’ve taken to going to bed once Elizabeth is asleep for the evening and tend to wake up at oh dark thirty, I couldn’t find them.
A while back, Andrea mentioned she wouldn’t mind me leaving the old iPod at home and hooked to the stereo so she could listen to her favorites, which seem mostly to be Liz Phair albums released when she was in high school. Nothing wrong with that! Didn’t like Liz much when Andrea and I met, but she’s grown on me since then. How many pop musicians can rock you on one track, then make you actually blush the next one?
Anyway, the dilemma now with a working ipod and no portable headphones was, do I just go buy a set of cheap headphones and forget about it? No, of course, you know I can’t do that. I spent way too much time pondering the relative merits of the shuffle, the mini, and the iPod Photo. After a few days of analysis paralysis, my basic cheap nature and a desire for instant gratification won out: I dashed right over to Circuit City and bought a Shuffle.
That little thing is SO COOL! I can’t believe they can store 16 hours of music on something that small and light, much less play it back with much better sound quality than the headphone out jack on my dual G5! The shuffle works out really well for me, and I’ve been very successful keeping it filled with things I want to hear by using smart playlists. It’s the perfect size and weight for exercising, so I’ve been using it on my indoor trainer most every morning since I got it. The headphone cord is actually more obtrusive than the shuffle itself. Did I mention it weighs less than an ounce?
