Better late than never10:22:40 AMOk, call me a Luddite. Whatever. I have been one sitting on the sidelines wondering what, exactly, is the big 
deal about iPods? Sure, carrying around some music would be nice from time to time but, really, they don't even have radios.
The first twinklings that there might actually be something to this iPod thing came along slowly.
Our two nineteen-year-olds got iPods for graduation from High School last year. They smiled but, hey, at 18 (at the time) and out of school, you don't see them much.
Small impression.
At a number of events in the last year I've noticed more and more of my geek friends carrying and, I'll admit, raving about their iPods. Some, Karen Hobert comes to mind, even going to the trouble to carry around portable speakers.
Yeah, but these are the same people who spend all their time at dinner playing with their super-multi-function cell phones. Another chink in the armor, though.
At Spring Break this year, Sydney, my 12-year-old, used her babysitting money to buy an iPod Mini. Ugly color but, hm, kind of interesting. Especially once I figured out you could download CDs onto it. Really? That's kind of cool.
I have a lot of CDs.
Big chink.
Then, looking through the American Express Member Rewards program recently I noticed I could get an iPod Photo for the points which were, at that moment, burning a hole in my pocket.
I bit.
It arrived last week sometime and, since then, I've managed to load a ton of songs from a pile of my CDs (and a few I bought off the iTunes web site). It is amazingly easy to do and suddenly it's easy to more or less justify all the money I've plunked down on CDs over the years.
My 451 songs, according to the iTunes client on my laptop, require just a bit less than 2 gigabytes of storage. My iPod has 30 gig. Short of selling my house and moving into a cheap apartment, I can't see how I could possibly afford to fill it up.
What I'm really enjoying, though, is just putting it on shuffle and letting it pick the songs while I work.
I guess the good news is, even though I'm a little slow, I'm trainable.
iPod. Highly recommended.
