Thursday, June 12, 2008

No, I don't own any White Stripes albums

I just spent some time with a friend who has moved from a PC to a Mac. Before he realized he needed someone versed in the ways of this particular world to hold his hand during the treacherous journey, he managed to turn his relatively full Windows-oriented iPod into an interesting technological curiosity empty of any content yet registering as half full. Or half empty. I guess people aren’t born downloading Senuti… On top of that, for reasons that elude me, he believed back in his PC days (last week) that he should rip his CDs as Apple Lossless, which turns out to save each song at about 22mgs, versus 2mgs or so for regular MP3s. Anyhow, I went down into to his cave, and by the time I finished sorting him out, if nothing else he was going to have 20 times as much space on his now Macintosh-based iPod. He was able to import his old music library as is, but unfortunately, as far as I could discover, there was no way to batch-process what he had already ripped down to the smaller versions, which has to be done one tedious file at a time. So what lessons did we learn from this?
1. Buy a Mac in the first place.
2. If you own even one White Stripes album, you probably don’t have the hair cells to hear a difference between Apple Lossless and MP3, so don't kid yourself. The point of an iPod is convenience, not high fidelity. If you want high fidelity, hire an orchestra.
3. The first thing to do when you buy music on iTunes is to burn it to a disk, which removes the DRM, provides a backup, and also allows you to play the music on any old CD player. And when your iPod goes to iPod heaven, you have all your purchased music available for easy reload. (Since you already know my thoughts on stealing music, we won't even discuss that option.)
4. Don’t use a Windows keyboard on a Macintosh Mini; it just annoys old Mac dogs like me. Pay the extra $50.
5. Buy a Mac in the second place, if you were too obtuse to do so in the first place.

In other news, I’ve been listening to an audiobook of one of Jim Butcher’s Dresden Files novels. Never heard of the guy before, and I’m loving it: it's the perfect drive-to-work accompaniment. If all his books were on Audible, I’d have signed up for an account today. I still might. I enjoy audiobooks, especially for things I wouldn’t ordinarily find time to read, like fantasy and SF. But I am also up to here in podcasts, which are not the same but are akin in that they are both talk on an iPod, and one has just so much time in one’s life for that sort of thing. If I set aside commute time for audiobooks, however, and morning exercise time for podcasts, I can probably work this out. I don’t think I could ever just sit in a comfy chair and listen to either, to tell you the truth. If I’m sitting where I can read something, I will, unless I don’t feel like reading, in which case I don’t want somebody else reading to me or yapping me over the pseudoradio. That’s why the DS was invented.

We do live in complicated times.

Since we’re in a technical mood today, I will point out that I just realized that my little cell phone can access the internet. It does this with the grace of [insert humorous metaphor here for some really graceless thing doing something that takes a lot of grace], but the miracle is that it does it at all, as Dr. Johnson might say. I don’t think I have any reason to do it, but it’s nice to know that I can. If I could seriously access my email from it, that would be rather sweet, which is why the iPhone is so theoretically attractive; God knows the phone part doesn't interest me much. Given that the new iPhone is figured to cost $100 or so a month, versus the $5 or so I’m paying now, I really don’t see one of those in my future, although that would solve the problem, such at it is. I was sort of thinking that the Touch would upgrade too, but that doesn’t seem to be happening, and how many iPods does one person need, anyhow? The Touch remains in the back of my mind, though, as the perfect way to watch Diggnation episodes on school buses. But I do need to upgrade my headphones. I’ve got the ones you stick in your ear about as far as the medulla oblongata that block ambient noise but make you feel as if your brain is in a vise; I want some Boses. Of course, everyone wants some Boses. Maybe some day… Provided we still get school buses next year. The price of fuel being what it is, we’ll be lucky if they give us maps.

What looms largest for me on the Man versus Machine front in the short term is a new espresso maker that is now in our kitchen. It came with a big, thick manual, and it looks suitably stern and forbidding. Real espresso, any time of day or night! But I understand that you don't just turn it on and there you are. There's real work involved in the learning. And if it ain't got the crema... You spend your weekend your way and I'll spend mine my way.

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