The iPod

Last week I bought an iPod. I bought one of those 80-gig iPod classics that has the video screen and all that good regular iPod stuff. Back inthe day I was a skeptic of apple products because back they were too expensive. I was a PC guy, who regularly rebuilt his PC and took pride in incrementally keeping his machine on the cutting edge. Recently, my lack of fandom has been due to their concern for "coolness" and lack of concern for a quality product (or at least any major technical progress). Slap a phone transmitter in a touch iPod and sell it for $600, fine, but where is the crazy progress?!? And shame on all of you who are upset that the iPhone dropped $200 in price mere months after its release. This trend has always been present, I remember paying $2400 for a 486 100 MHz machine in 94, and then getting a PII 333 MHz machine in 1998 for $650. If you want to be an early adopter, that's great and your are a necessary market, but understand the cycle from early adopter to mainstream is no longer in years, it is in months and possibly days. But I digress...

I am a podcast addict and it has become a scarry thing. I will download and listen to anything, so long as it is a podcast. Could be two dudes in their garage talking about WoW, or BBC World News, or NPR Fresh Air, or the Penny Arcade guys, it doesn't matter. My favorites thus far are the G4 podcasts: daily feed, around the net, AOTS, and fresh ink. I have also become a huge fan of the DC Comics podcasts and a podcast called Comic Geek Speak. For any of you comic book fans out there, CGS is very, very good at giving overviews and insight to universe books like Countdown in DC and hipping you to new things (which will be a post after this one). I have also found some brewing podcasts that are amazing, with the exception that some contain more ads than actual podcast.

I have also had the pleasure of downloading some albums from the itunes store. The itunes store has proven to be a savior for me. I have spent the last 3 years looking for a vinyl called 'Farmer's Market' by Art Farmer. Not only did itunes have it for $6.17 in mp3 format, but they had two other Art Farmer albums that I believed to be vinyl only with no CD re-issues. That makes me an itunes store fan...or at least put me on the path until this happened. itunes store had Maynard Ferguson's 'Blues Roar'!!! Seriously, the Blues Roar in it's glory. Although I know this was re-issued on CD it is impossible to find. My mint condition 1st pressing vinyl is on my wall in my apartment, framed and the main attraction of my Maynard Ferguson vinyl collection, and of the future "Eric Newgard's Maynard Mania Museum". When I can go online and buy albums in mp3 format that I can't get anywhere but on vinyl, I will use your service and I will preach your greatness to my friends and enemies.

Damn you Steve Jobs for your cunning manipulation of my vinyl to mp3 obsession and my love of good tunes that I must have at my disposal all the time.