About a year ago our company told its employees to stop using their work computers to stream online radio and if they needed music to listen to while they did their work (the quiet of engineering can drive a person mad) then they needed to use their "iPods." I of course would never own an iPod, even though I used Itunes strictly for podcast subscriptions, their directory is by far the largest and most easily managable. And anytime one of my fellow employees got an Ipod I'd end up helping them set it up, so I learned how they worked pretty fast... Still I refused to own one, the price alone was enough to turn me off.

I had a Rio Sport for a while and loved it, but when I changed over to my iPaq for music I gave the Rio to my sister-in-law when she had her second kid. I ended up regretting that because the transfer speed for an iPaq is so friggin slow it makes listening to podcasts an impossibility. I had been secretly listening to them on my work computer even after they told us no streaming radio (not exactly the same) but then the sound card went out... And it was the kind thats built into the motherboard, and the company wasn't about to get me a new computer just because I couldn't listen to podcasts.

For my wife's birthday she'd asked for two things, these green Skullcandy lowrider headphones that we'd seen Tango from Ghosthunters wearing (though his are red) and a good MP3 player to match. The only one with halfway decent reviews that matched her green headphones was the Samsung YP-3. She ended up hating it... I failed to concieve what the words "electrostatic controls" meant. It means its freaking hard as hell to control the damn thing. So anyway I ended up using that for listening to podcasts on that, which was a huge pain in the ass but I put up with it.

So for Christmas I asked for black Skullcandy lowrider headphones, which are cool because they're collapsable and have great sound, and my birthday (which was Jan 31st) I wanted a black 4gb Zune. I liked how they worked, and how they had more features than an Ipod at less of a price. But we didn't have the money for my birthday so my wife said when we got our taxes back we could get one.

While I waited I was getting hesitant about the Zune... I still loved the device itself but I discovered you had to install a bloated (365 meg) Itunes-like program that was a little on the confusing side and that not only would I have to import all my music but the podcast directory didn't have any of my shows in it, so I'd have to download them in Itunes and then import them into the Zune program and then sync to the Zune. More work than I wanted. But still, the price was right and I thought I could deal.

So we got our money yesterday and we had a list of stuff we needed, and we figured we'd hit Walmart first. And the website said they had them in stock... Of course we get there and they're totally out. And I'm annoyed as hell, I could have gone to Best Buy to get one but Lonna was sick as hell...

What Walmart DID have in stock was the 8 gig black iPod Nano. Which was $75 more than what I'd been planning to spend on the 4 gig Zune, but the price on that had gone up since I'd originally looked at it... The 8 gig Zune was only $10 more, and this 8 gig iPod was only $8 more than that. And after thinking about it... if I got the iPod, I all ready use Itunes, I wouldn't need another bloated software program,  I all ready knew how to use an iPod...

So I bought the iPod.

*sigh*

But you know what, it works. It manages not to piss me off, other than the fact that its so damn small its hard to hold in my hand. But then its based on flash memory so if I drop it its not gonna break or anything. And the device interface isn't terrible. It isn't as good as the Zune, and there's no FM tuner, but thats not a big deal because the Samsung does... that was just one of those nice things to have during the innauguration, but other than that I never use the function.

But like I said, it works. Does what I need. And has a crap load of room to spare, so I can subscribe to a few more podcasts that I wouldn't otherwise.