I finally have an iPod

A few days before Christmas, Lisa and I were at Crabtree Valley Mall in Raleigh and we wound up going into the Apple Store there. That was the first time that I ever beheld the video capability of the iPod. The first thing that I thought about was that this would be a neat way to carry around my video work to show to people. It was enough to make me forget about my initial reluctance to get an iPod (which has mostly been based on how they don't have user-replaceable batteries).

So last week, on our way back from Georgia, we stopped at a Best Buy and I used a gift card that was a Christmas present from Mom, and got me an 80 gigabyte iPod classic. And I have to admit: this is a very addictive little gadget to have! I'm finally starting to understand why so many people are loyal iPod owners. As you can see from the photo, I've already got a few episodes of Monday Night Live put on it (now you know that this is my own iPod, 'cuz who else would put Monday Night Live on their iPod?) in addition to my school board commercials, Forcery (I did a whole new encoding of it and it looks amazing on an iPod), The Baritones, and it'll soon have Schrodinger's Bedroom on it as soon as I finish the edit with the longer end credits. It's also got Lost season 3 (and I'm working on getting the first two put on it also), all six episodes of Police Squad!, most of "Weird Al" Yankovic's music videos, a bunch of Looney Tunes cartoons, all six Star Wars movies, The Lord of the Rings and Matrix trilogies, Transformers, 300, King Kong (the 1933 original), Raiders of the Lost Ark, The Thing, O Brother Where Art Thou?, hundreds of songs making up dozens of albums, and a few podcasts including TheForce.net and Charles Stanley's sermons from First Baptist of Atlanta.

Those are just a few of the things that I've loaded on my iPod in the past week... and it's still got tons of room left! It hasn't even got half-full yet. I'm also going to put some of my favorite episodes of The Simpsons on it, maybe the entire Godfather saga, and probably Blade Runner (I got the 5-disc mega-ultimate DVD set for Christmas, so now I just have to figure out which version of the movie to put on the iPod :-).

By the way, this is the very first Apple product that I've ever bought. Time will tell if I wind up like most other Apple aficionados that I know, who stick with the product line throughout all its iterations. No doubt the Steve Jobs Mob is already working to roll out a better iPod: one with flash memory (this might be one of the last iPods with a hard-drive) but as good as I take care of stuff, I'm expecting this lil' gimmick to last me a plenty long time. Maybe I'll upgrade to a better model... in 2010 or so.

Okay so to all of y'all who already have iPods: what else should I put on this thing?