The Best Dollar I Ever Spent

The iPhone app, Angry Birds, is the single most entertaining thing you can get for a dollar. If you have an iPhone or iTouch, get this app today. If you were thinking about getting an iPhone, then let this be the thing that pushes you over the edge. If you don't have an iPhone and weren't considering getting one, then maybe you should.

Angry Birds rules.

In Which I Compare My Old iPod With My New iPod

Some evil genius who works for Apple managed to invent an entire line of devices that become indispensible in your life almost immediately, cost like $300, and, like clockwork, break every three years. Then when you go to see if they can fix it they either say that they can't or that it will cost $150. Either way, you might as well just get a new one because they get better all the time. So, for the second time since I digitized my music collection, my iPod broke.

I don't want to hear from you about how you still have the iPod with the 4 buttons on top and it still works great. I take my iPod everywhere and I listen to it all day. I go running with it and I have it in my car and it gets a lot of general wear every day. I take care of it, but there's just an unavoidable depreciation that it goes through (that's probably not a good context for "depreciation") every day. But at the same time, there's no reason that it should simply stop working after a couple years. The Apple "genius" (seriously, Apple?) went on and on about how the iPod classic just has a regular hard drive and those moving parts just won't hold up to that wear and tear. I never had a walkman or discman break like this and there are a billion more moving parts in those.

Anyhow (see what i mean), I had to get a new iPod and there were many reasons why it seemed to make sense that I should get an iPod touch instead of a classic iPod. First is that the "genius" (for the love of Christ) was going on and on about the moving parts thing and how an iTouch uses flash memory and has no moving parts and will stand up better to the everyday use. I don't know if I believe that line of bullshit as the iTouch seems a lot more fragile, but it definitely doesn't have any moving parts, so I guess there's something to it. Also the iTouch is just cooler, isn't it. And since I'm 31 and married and have a kid and I've managed to hold down a job for 7 years now, I just have to take cool wherever I can get it. (I totally understand the 55 year olds in Corvettes now, by the way.)

So you'd think the iTouch must be better than the classic iPod in every conceivable way, wouldn't you, but, surprisingly, that's not the case. There are some things about it that are indsiputably amazing, but there are some minor annoying things that just bug me about it. First of all, it won't charge in my car. If I plug it in to the thing that's supposed to pump the songs through the radio and simultaneously charge it, it pops up a message that says chargin is not supported for some reason. So it does play the music on the radio, but it does not cahrge. I never had to think about my Classic charging because it was plugged into my car so often that it would always be at full charge. Now I have to worry about if it's charged or not before I leave the house or actually bring the charger with me and charge it at work or wherever. That's fucking ghetto.

Secondly, you can only work the thing by actually toucing the screen and interacting with the interface. It sounds stupid to say that you have to touch the iTouch to make it work, but it's really annoying. I can't just reach into my pocket and replay or skip a song. I have to take it out of my pocket, press the button, unlock the screen, and then do whatever I want to do. And you obviously have to look at the screen to do it, so it's far more difficult to do while driving. Or just sitting, for that matter.

Additionally, there is this feature where you can shake the iTouch to make it shuffle the music. This falls under the "just because you can, doesn't mean you should" category. I don't see why anyone would need to use this feature. Plus, unless you disable it, it mistakes anything for shaking. Things like, ahh, walking, or slipping into your shirt pocket. Until I realized what was going on and disabled it I had to take the thing out of my pocket in order to unshuffle it every ten steps. Freakin' stupid.

Also, I ended up getting only the 32GB model when i really should have gotten the 64GB model. I was only using 30GB on my classic, but I really need more room to expand, especially with the much greater video capabilities of this one. Really lacked foresight there, though it was also $100 more expensive, which is obviously why I didn't get it in the first place. The classic is less expensive and now only comes in a 160GB model, which is clearly more space than I need. I can't imagine who would need that much space on a Classic iPod with inferior video capabilities.

The one thing that does make this far far far cooler than a classic iPod is the applications, or "apps" as the kids are calling them these days. There are tons of free apps for cool games or any other sort of thing. Also you can pay for apps I guess, though I have yet to, and probably won't. And the video quality is way better with the bigger screen and everything. It's also much easier to navigate through the video section in the Touch than with the Classic. The apps alone really do a lot in terms of balancing out the bad things, but those minor differences are really really annoying on a day to day basis.

The Frabulous Playlist

UPDATE: I did some extensive searching through some old mix CDs I had a discovered a bunch of songs last night that were not in my iTunes Library. Many of them went directly onto the Frabulous playlist. As a result, rather than 192 songs, the Frabulous playlist now has 237 songs, all of which are reflected on the list.

It took longer than it seems like it should to make a list of all the songs on the Frabulous Playlist. If you missed something, I posted earlier about making the perfect iTunes playlist. And yes, the second song on the list (sorted alphabetically) is "After The Rain" by Nelson. Deal with it, bitch. I am not suggesting that these are the only good songs in the world. I'm also not suggesting that the list will remain static forever or that there aren't other songs that are good enough to be on the list.

I'll start your comment for you. Choose from one of the below:
a) This playlist sucks because....
b) How can you say this is the best playlist ever when you don't even have...
c) I don't believe you have [song name] on the list and you claim this is a good list...
d) Now that I've read your playlist I know why you pussy out of fights all the time.
(choose d only if angry at the whole world)

Zen and the Art of the iTunes Playlist

I first got an iPod in 2005. Getting an iPod versus having a CD player is one of those enormous leaps on the technological timeline that really is life changing. I don't want to overstate the idea when I say it's life changing. It's not like having a kid or anything, but at the same time, for someone who likes to listen to music (and I assume that everyone falls into that category. Like making a subgroup of people who like breathing), having an iPod changes the way you live your life. First of all, you don't have to buy CDs anymore. Secondly, you can carry your entire music collection on one iPod. I'm guessing that I have a relatively large and eclectic music collection that has grown pretty steadily since roughly 1989. My collection, combined with my wife's comprises roughly 30GB of memory on my iPod, which is cabaple of holding 80GB. So I've got a ways to go.

Incidentally, at the time i bought my current iPod, the choices in terms of memory (side note: I really hate people who use the term vis-a-vis and also people who use the suffix -wise. For example in this current sentence, if you would say "my choices vis-a-vis memory" or "my choices memorywise" then you suck. If you use the first one, then you are a pretentious douche, the heir to the Masengill fortune, if you will. If you use the second one, then you need to gain a firmer grasp on the English language to more clearly state what you mean.) were to get an iPod that held 4GB, 8GB, 80GB, and 160GB, and nothing in between. I really only needed like 40GB to hold my existing collection and potentially grown into a slightly larger one, but that choice was lacking. At the same time, I seriously considered buying the 160GB one because it was actually a good value vis-a-vis paying like $50 more for twice as much memory, but then I decided I would never use the 80GB, so there was no way I'd ever use the 160GB.

All of this is sortof beside the point I want to make, except that it's all related iPodwise. My real point is that since I got that first iPod in 2005 I've been working on creating the perfect iTunes playlist. It's much harder than it seems it should be. The nature of the iTunes playlist is that you are not limited by things like space and time (Roads? Where we're going we don't need roads.) and as such, you can make the playlist as long as you want. On a CD you've got to pare the choices down to basically 15 or so songs, so you end up with a pretty tight mix every time (it's in the gies) although it could get boring to listen to in a couple months or so. My working theory was that I should be able to create one playlist that I could listen to forever. It would basically act as what I would consider to be the perfect radio station with songs from every genre with different energies and really the only thing they have in common is awesomeness.

With awesomeness as my copilot my first iTunes playlist, creatively titled "Jerry's Playlist", consisted of about 600 songs. I would put my iPod on shuffle, and listen to it wherever I went. In the car, running, walking to places, you get the idea. The problem with the 600 song playlist is that there are too many marginally good songs and not enough awesome songs. I would end up skipping a lot of songs and that kindof defeated the purpose of the perfect playlist in my mind. The second playlist I made, "The Short List", was created to remedy that song skipping situation. I knew the problem was that there were too many songs on the list and I needed to limit myself to only songs that I really liked. That list had about 350 songs. The second list ended up being only the second step in the evolutionary process. Still there were some songs that were not good enough to stand up to repeated listening, which is to say forever.

About three weeks ago I created what, to date, is the greatest iTunes playlist ever created. It's titled "Frabulous", obviously, and it has 192 songs. I went through my entire music library and picked only the songs that I was confident I could listen to over and over for eternity. The other day something happened that has never happened before. I was listening to the playlist at work and the music stopped. I thought it might be a really low intro to a song and then I thought that the battery may have died, but when I looked at the iPod, it turns out that I had actually listened to the entire playlist all the way through. Again, this is something that has never happened. Typically I'll listen to the playlist until I get in the mood to listen to a particular album or a specific song and then I'll back out of the playlist to do that and then come back to it. When you come back to the playlist it reshuffles the songs and the count starts over again.

In short, this playlist is amazing. It's as close to perfect as I've come so far vis-a-vis playlistwise. I was initially confounded by my ability to make what was essentially a neverending playlist, but now I realize that all good things must come to an end. Like this post.