At the weekend, I had a roundabout discussion -- whose circular nature I don't blame on the other person, but a painful ability we share to tell one another precisely the same things in different ways -- on the unnecessarily complicated nature of iPods.
She has no interest in being like me and skim-reading several books that explain, like Apple can't be bothered to do in its packaged paperwork, why it's sometimes necessary to press two buttons at once and stuff like this. See below for more technical stuff and the helpful iPod item mentioned on the front page.
What my equally riled conversation partner didn't tell me (and vice versa) came from a woman at work today.
Late last year, Sarah sustained a nasty but invisible, in its latter phases, wrench and break to her wrist, a prominently exposed part of her. The protest was that many iPod users find her invisible permanently. She's absolutely right.
I see this myself every day, especially now they're everywhere -- not just iPods but all manner of music players where you'd believe the owners shove the earphones into their eyes. On buses, on pavements and in trains, they are constantly banging into people.
And, as my colleague pointed out, "It hurts! They're off in their own little worlds and don't give a damn about anyone else."
Of course, I don't do this very often since I'm far too busy avoiding people anyway, the way one does after living among abominable masses of them for 50 years and observing what they get down to in their dealings with one another.
Since we live in an era where Apple is no longer what it used to be and has gone down-market making fashion accessories I don't consider to be "real" iPods at absurdly high prices for what you get, is ever stingier with manuals and extra parts in the box, and then charges another fortune for what the firm itself now calls "accessories" -- like a Firewire cable for the many people who don't have USB 2.0 and don't want it any time soon -- what do you expect?
The "Apple is more like Micro$oft every day" argument bores me now because of the truth in it, but given the American liking for lawsuits, I can see the day coming when people who get whacked as often as my colleague file a mass action against Steve. What's problematic, however, is the potential defence argument that they're blind before they even get their iPods.
It's frankly disturbing to see how many men in Paris, among Apple's recent acquisitions who have their wires dangling as dangerously and stupidly as in the advertisements, haul pink Minis out of their pocket.
Pink!
I don't wish to know what's on their playlists... Moreover, who seriously wants to watch movies on a screen the size of a decorative postage stamp?
I'm not doing that to my eyes.
I was going to write about some splendid podcasts and why the French have decided that Canada is today one of the most interesting musical poles in the world, but I saw two smart suits with pink Minis on the way home and it turned my stomach.
After more listening to Metric, I'm going to count the number of Canadian women on my real iPod, since come to think of it, there are a lot of them.
Later.
I had a better idea, given the frame of mind. I wondered how many poor suckers (people who have yet to download a dodgy new version of iTunes without checking first, etc.) -- might have penned odes to their iPods. The answer is terrifying.
One I did like, though, by Maura, a long-time user.
She calls it an ode, but really it was a 15-entry list of brief reasons at notmyself.com on "why my iPod is better than a boyfriend". Somebody else's ode disagrees with her first three, but the closing bunch were penned with a golden nib...
For those made mad by manuals
It's very irritating trying to get a recalcitrant iPod to "mount" (that is, show up on your computer so you can inspect it) when the various methods provided by Apple -- if not in the box -- fail to work, so you have to go off on a long hunt for alternative means, probably learning more technology on the way than you'd like.
The "usual risk warning" is that now iTunes 6.0.3 is out ... only recently out, unless I've been on the moon ... take care! Regulars will know I never install a new version without reading about it first. My software download panel opened and offered it to me as I moved this entry, I chose the "download only" option and won't upgrade until I know it is safe. Why the uninstalled package that went where it should for now has an October date on it, don't ask me. I've not yet looked at the specialist sites.
Update at Feb 20: iTunes 6.0.3 works fine for me and apparently has a green light from friends with Windows XP.
For fellow Mac users, however, your Disk Utility may malfunction after the iTunes upgrade. If it does, see MacFixit. They've published post-upgrade solutions to this problem.
I'm deeply pissed off with trying to produce a brief summary of remedies for the general good when the answers are scattered everywhere and by the time you've got the key points in one place, the models in question are no longer on the market.
A lot of people don't have time to wade through specialist sites, even the fine ones. One service was done to all Mac users at least by writer John Rizzo and the O'Reilly people on my front page when they made the 15-page 'iPod Annoyances' section of a book called 'Mac Annoyances' available free to everybody. Since they did this themselves, I trust I'm breaking no rules by putting that .pdf file somewhere you can simply click on the link to fetch, like they did.
Some of the info in it is useful to PC and Windows users. You can either click to open it in another browser window if yours reads .pdf files as most do nowadays, or right-click to download it to your own machine (and if that browser happens to be Internet Explorer, you have only yourself to blame, not me, for the mangled presentation it gives part of my site, like it does others that conform to internationally accepted standards and not the ones Microsoft has invented. Do get Firefox -- or almost any other modern browser -- instead, if you'd rather live in the current century, not the stone age of home computing. It only takes 10 minutes to install).
My own iPod contribution may get me riled when it seems worthless until I remember that, apart from the friends for whom I began it, there are a lot of you out there with iPods that aren't the most recent types. Even if they are, basic rules still apply for keeping them happy. The happy day I've got as much of that information as I can into one place clearly -- and I don't know when that will be, since it's no longer a priority, but a dossier I just add to from time to time -- I'll likely be able to do just the same with it: bung it on my .Mac disk and tell you it's there.
An even longer-term project is to move all such technically tedious and Mac-related entries out of The Orchard, where I like it little more than on the front page, but I'd rather go on writing about music now than spend my time creating a new log category for stuff the manufacturers should have done in the first place.
10:43:33 PM 
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