I'm Officially An iPodder

I've never been one to be stuck in the past. Appreciating the past as a reference to where I've been, but trying hard not to live there. I strive to embrace technology, and all the promise, potential, and pitfalls it brings.

Yesterday I picked up my first iPod. For those of you who don't know, an iPod is a portable music player. Plus a lot more. You can get iPods that have from 512 megabytes of storage to 40 gigs (40,000 megabytes). Mine holds 30 gigaytes, which is many thousand songs. It also holds and displays pictures, so I can walk around with a portable electronic photo album. Sound quality is incredible, and it's small enough to easily fit in a shirt pocket. And if you want to talk about cool, next time you have people discussing oldies, such as the lyrics to Clarence Carter's Strokin', or Vince Gill's guitar work in Pure Prairie League's Amie, or how much cowbell there really was in Blue Oyster Cult's Don't Fear The Reaper, you can whip out the 'ol IPod and show them. And yes, I do have all those songs on my iPod, plus Franz Ferdinand, Hank Williams Sr., Radiohead, Miles Davis, Dr. Dre, The Butthole Surfers, Magic Slim, The Black Eyed Peas, The Gourds, The Jets, and, of course, Hendrix.

Another really cool thing you can get are "podcasts". These are like radio shows you download into your iPod to listen to later. So if you commute to work, or have downtime at any time, you can listen to these shows. Anything from blogs to opinion to news. If people talk about it around the coffee pot, you can find it on a podcast.

These things get the POTS "Far Out" seal of approval.