My wonderful musical collaborator (who must remain a mystery to all but my closest confidants) just sent a wonderful gift – the iPod I’ve always wanted, but always hesitated to get for myself. It’ll be a great companion for my trip to England in August, where I’ll be attending the International Council For Traditional Music conference. I put together about 20 hours worth of music and audio (such as the Pimsleur Beginning Irish course), and it still only filled up a bit over a gigabyte of the 20 gig hard drive. Wow. I need to get some Daily Source Code, Morning Coffee Notes and other podcasts to fill up that drive. It’ll make a great companion on the new exercise routine as well.
I also quickly figured out how to fill out move data from Mac OS X’s Address Book and Calendar, as well as adding personal notes. Minor grumble – the text files cannot contain Unicode characters, so displaying Hawaiian properly is out of the question. Other than that the integration with the OS is amazing and seamless. Seems appropriate to get this new toy the day after I got rid of the cell phone.
My daughter has an iPod Shuffle, and my wife looked lustily at my new toy. Gulp. Looks like she’s going to have to get one for her birthday at the end of the month.
