leelee had a post today about her new blog where she's going to showcase music that she plays while cleaning the kitchen. the music has turned a totally dreadful experience into something she looks forward too. i'm the same way. friday nights after work i'll get sick of looking at the piles of clothes on the washer and i'll kick the stereo on and do some cleaning. i'll usually wash/dry/fold the clothes, do a load of dishes and just kind of decompress. then about every other sunday i'll kick the doors open and get a good cross breeze going, turn up the stereo and do the stupid chores like vacuuming, general straightening, etc... the music just makes it so much easier to get stuff done.

things changed significantly with the arrival of my ipod. i won it for filling out a survey about a website i used to have. up until then, i thought they were pretty stupid, and couldn't understand why people would spend the money for one. i had a PDA and i stored music on it, and used it as a walkman on roadtrips, etc... but with it, i had to rotate my songs out from time to time, and that was just as much of a chore as lugging cd's around. it wasn't til i got the ipod that i realized how wonderful it was to just rip all my cds once and then never touch them again. the ipod went everywhere with me. plug it into the stereo and use it as an alarm clock to wake up to the song of my choice, then plug it into the car and play my music on the way to work instead of listening to jabbering idiots. then plug it into the computer at work and listen to it all day there, again for the commute home, then plug it back into the home stereo.

it was such a great little device. i loved the way that it created playlists for me, categorized my music, and stuff like that. it learned what my favorite songs are and i could just chose that playlist for hours of music. when i wanted softer stuff to fall asleep to, it was easy enough to create those kinda of playlists. it just seemed like the greatest thing in the world.

then the honeymoon was over. the battery life started getting shorter and shorter, drastically so. i deployed here and for some reason decided to take the protective case off of it. i babied this thing for the first 7 months of its life. never dropped it, kept it in a rubberized case, the works. i took the case off, and to my shock the body of the player had started to seperate. the metal half of it had warped and pulled away from the plastic part of the body. i immediately contacted apple and was told it was out of warranty. i could pay 50 bucks to have the battery replaced, but that was it. they informed me that the battery must've overheated and warped the case, but that wasn't a manufacturer's defect? say what?

i wish i could say i was surprised, but i wasn't. when i deployed to afghanistan in 2001, i bought an apple ibook. within 30 days, the dvd stopped opening. i emailed apple and was basically told that i'd have to lose the ibook for 2 weeks for it to be repaired. 2 weeks in afghanistan time = 45-60 days. i asked if they could annotate it so i could swap it out for a new one when i returned to the states. i really didn't want a less-than-a-month old laptop repaired, i wanted it replaced. no luck. repair was apparently my only option. when i got home, i planned to pick back up being a full time employee and full time student, i couldn't afford to be without a laptop for two weeks. i didn't have a choice though, so immediately after i got it back i sold it on ebay. however by this time it wasn't a 30 day old laptop, it was a year old laptop and i took a big hit on it.

so i wasn't surprised to hear they weren't standing behind their ipod product, even after a lawsuit was raised against them for mis advertising their battery life. what DID surprise me though, was to realize that the unit we replaced here in iraq had purchased the same model ipod i had, at about the same time(this unit does alot of stuff with radio stations and loudspeaker broadcasts, so it's necessary to record alot of audio clips for playback later, hence the need for the mp3 player). these were all less than a year old. and they had 100% failure rate. so we now have about 20 paperweights. once again, apple didn't feel that this was a warranty problem.

i suffered on. the player still played and i still babied it. but then it glitched. i don't know what happened, but all of a sudden it didn't have all of my music anymore. fortunatey, i had it all on my laptop. all i had to do was sync it again, start over from scratch, right? nope. the battery on the ipod is so shot that it wouldn't stay powered up long enough to transfer all my music. and instead of realizing that it had transferred half of it when it recharged, it always thinks it has to start over again from the beginning.

so i've switched. i'm totally convinced that i have to have the mp3 player. i used it more than enough to warrant the cost. my sanity is worth $288 bucks. i'll just never buy another apple product. the kind of sad part though was that my new mp3 player showed up last week (a creative zen vision:m, i highly recommend it, although you'll need to read the brief instructions to figure the buttons out, it's not quite as intuitive as the ipod) and it didn't really thrill me that much. i'm a huge gadget freak, and normally i love ripping open new boxes and playing with a new toy. but i kinda already knew everything about this one. it was just a really expensive toy to replace a really expensive toy i had but that didn't work right. there wasn't that same sense of newness about it. damn those apple folks for taking my joy away! the other kind of sad part is that i lost some of my music. without realizing it, i'd saved alot of it in apple's proprietary format. so i'll have to spend some time and money obtaining that music again. yay!

i have NO idea how i got here from talking about leelee's new blog.