When I was a kid, I would spend exorbitantly (for an allowance-based income, anyway) on comic books. When I got older, I started to squander even more money on compact discs. I’ve largely left both hobbies behind, at least in terms of being an active consumer, but really, they’re dwarfed in dollar value by this addiction I have to all things Macintosh-related. And this list doesn’t even take into account many periodic, impulsive software registration fees — programs like NetNewsWire, OmniWeb and SnapzPro X. I guess admitting the problem is the first step.
Did Somebody Say iPod photo?
That’s right, I finally got around to replacing the second-generation iPod that I, stupidly, left in the back seat of a taxi cab late last year. For a long time, I resisted buying myself a new unit, even holding off on picking up an iPod shuffle, because I felt that, by losing mine, I had clearly demonstrated that I don’t deserve a new one. Yeah, I have some issues.
But I found a way around that. As a gift to me, my mother sent me three US$100 gift cards from Best Buy, which she got as a kind of perquisite from her job. I immediately took all three of them to my local store and cashed them in for two-thirds of the 40GB model iPod photo. I paid the balance on my credit card, a cost I wanted to avoid by buying a plain ol’, color-free iPod, but every Best Buy in the city seems to be out of stock of those models.
Initially, I found the iPod photo a kind of silly idea of limited use and entertainment value. But when I hooked mine up to my television with the included cable and had a slideshow of all my photos going in less than 30 seconds (backed with a soundtrack from my own music library, to boot), I changed my mind entirely. This is a pretty great piece of engineering. I’m hooked on it, you could say.
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