love/hate.

about 3 weeks ago, we took advantage of the fact that he's going back to school, and bought a powerbook, which came with a "free" ipod mini. since he already had a 30gb ipod, i got the mini.

it was silver.

at first, i was very confused. for one thing, you can't just rip songs from a cd and put them on your ipod. at least, not using itunes. itunes likes to keep them in a "library," which means it stores them all on your harddrive. i don't want music stored on my harddrive, that's what i have an ipod for. alright, so it's only 4 gigs, it's still the principle of the thing. computers, in my mind, are Not For Music. i understand that i am unusual in this, but that's just the way it is. possibly, it's because i don't really listen to music in general. nearly 10 years after receiving my first cd player, i believe my entire collection tops out at something like 30 cds.

we decided to put my music on the server, because he had never ripped my cds anyway, and he's not one to ever turn down more music. so, over the course of a few weeks, i gradually ripped my cd collection and slowly built up the ipod. then, i bought new headphones for it so i could listen to it while i walked to and from work. my ears are too small for the earbuds; they hurt. this is going to be so cool, i thought. now i can listen to music while i walk. i like listening to music when i have to go places in the morning.

i bring the headphones home sunday afternoon, and put them in the ipod. for those of you who don't know, even if the ipod is locked, it will still turn on when it detects headphones.

nothing happened.

i held the pause/play button. nothing happened. i took the ipod upstairs and plugged into my computer's usb port. nothing happened. at this point, i was a little concerned. i plugged the ipod into the ac adapter. ah! it turned on. i plugged it back into my computer. nothing happened. well, maybe windows was being funny; it had also stopped recognizing my digital camera earlier. so we plugged it into the mac's usb. nothing happened. we attempt to reboot it by holding down the menu and select buttons. it turned off. we plugged it back in. it turned on, but still did not recognize the pc nor mac, nor was it recognized by either of them.

we took a break to watch The Simpsons.

then, we had an idea. why not plug it into the firewire port? we plugged it into firewire. success! thinking the firmware might be screwed up, we re-formatted it for mac. then we plugged it into the firewire on my computer. i didn't even know i had firewire until sunday night. i downloaded the newest ipod updater and told it to update my ipod's firmware.

it said, disk write error.

well, shit. then it popped up the folder-with-exclamation-point icon. no apple, no music, just a folder with an exclamation point. i gave in, and actually went to www.apple.com/support. it told me to uninstall the ipod software, uninstall itunes, re-download and install them, and attempt to update the ipod again.

i did. it worked. yay! now all i had to do was copy all my music and podcasts back onto it. so i sat there and copied everything back. at this point, i saw why it wanted to keep all your music on your computer. then i turned off my ipod and went to bed.

this morning, i was supposed to walk to work. having packed my lunch, grabbed an extra t-shirt, found my phone, wallet, and keys, and put my shoes on, i was ready to leave. i clipped my ipod to the strap of my bag, and held down the pause/play button.

nothing happened.

i put the headphones in. nothing happened. he came downstairs and did the same thing. nothing happened. and now i was late for work. so he drove me to work, and we decided we'd take the ipod back to the apple store because the thing was obviously fucked.

we did. i gave them an edited version of this story, concluding with, "i think the firmware just keeps crashing." the young man in the black apple t-shirt looked at it and said, "yep. we'll just replace it." then he came back from the back of the store and told me that there were no more warranty replacement silver ipod minis in stock. would i give them my phone number so they could call me when they got some more?

4 days until my new ipod.