Life without iPod

When I spilled some water on my desk, I thought I had whisked the iPod to safety in time, but the next day I noticed telltale droplets on the bottom surface and it wouldn't turn on or charge.

I Googled various combinations of "ipod water damage", and the gist of the suggestions was to keep the iPod turned off while letting it dry (under gentle sun where possible) for up to a week. I had already made some attempts to turn it on, which may have sealed its doom. I haven't been able to get a peep out of it after several days. All the advice seemed to be for a disk-based model, and I have a flash-based Nano; don't know if the all-memory models are more susceptible to damage this way.

This poses an interesting conundrum for the commute by car. I have a 6-disc CD changer, but it only reads music CDs not MP3 CDs. The compromise I've settled on is:

- 3 CDs worth of music.
- 3 CDs worth of podcasts. (I'm working my way through the early CS courses of UC Berkeley, just to see what it is that makes Silicon Valley companies so snooty when they ask where you went to school.)
- Music CDs burned at random from one of my favorite playlists, suitable for driving.
- Music CDs not labelled at all, so I can swap 3 in randomly from a bigger selection, and have no idea what will come up.
- Podcasts carefully labelled (title and episode number), so I can fill up slots 4, 5, and 6 and keep track when wrapping around. E.g. sometimes I put the next 2 episodes in CD slots 4 and 5, before I've listened to the earlier episode that's still in slot 6.

The downside of podcasts on music CDs is that one episode takes a whole CD, assuming it's reasonably long, regardless of the bit rate / sound quality.

One-Hear Wonders

Am I the only one who ever had this experience? In the heyday of cassette recording in the '70s and '80s, sometimes I would hear the first few notes of a song on the radio, instantly decide it was worth recording, and turn on the tape recorder. (Until I acquired a radio with built-in tape deck, this process involved slapping a manual tape recorder upside-down on top of my clock radio.) Sometimes, I never heard the song again. Some of the songs had no or incomprehensible lyrics, so that I didn't even know their titles. I think of these songs as "one-hear wonders", where they stuck in my mind or even became favourites, just from a single airing on my local radio station.

My favourite examples from this category are:

Tempus Fugit (Yes): I didn't know its title or who did it, for about 15 years, until I bought "Drama" at Vortex Records in Toronto.

Battle Scar (Max Webster, guest vocalist Geddy Lee of Rush): I'm sure I only ever heard this once on the radio. For years in the MP3 age, I couldn't find any digital version of it.

Hocus Pocus (Focus): The only vocal on this song is some yodelling. I didn't know the group or the title. Iron Butterfly stuck in my mind, but that was wrong, leading me down a dead end. I vaguely remembered a DJ saying that it was a Dutch group, and ultimately some Googling turned up the song details.

Phasors on Stun (FM): Canadian group FM is very hard to track down online. Ditto the solo efforts of member Nash the Slash. I wound up getting a secondhand CD of "Black Noise" from Amazon and recognized this song from way back. I probably heard it several times on the radio, but never actually had it on tape.

Cinnamon Girl (Neil Young): "Live Rust" was an early addition to my CD collection, so it was only a one-hear wonder for six years or so. I only remember one radio play, yet it became one of my favourite songs on my own mix tapes.

Godzilla (Blue Oyster Cult): Between the SNL "More Cowbell" sketch and some old videos resurrected on VH1, other Blue Oyster Cult songs are more well-known. But this for me is their best. Bonus points to this band for inventing the Heavy Metal Umlaut.

TVC15 (David Bowie): I must have gone about 30 years without hearing this song. Not sure how I missed it through various Bowie "Greatest Hits" collections. Never had it on tape.

Candy Candy (Iggy Pop featuring Kate Pierson): My wife tracked down the vide for this song on VH1. She remembered it clearly. I only have a faint recollection of the tune, probably from a single play on the radio.

iPod, oh iPod, Where Art Thou?

When John bought his first iPod, it came with a bright blue case, and so was fairly easy to find. By the time he bought his 3rd iPod, the Nano version (which we affectionately call "Nanoo"), he also had a Palm, a cell phone, and a digital camera, all stored in small black cases. We took Nanoo on a trip in May and hadn't seen him since we got home until mid-November, when John did a massive desk clean-up and found the little black case resting quietly under some larger items! So my (self-imposed) project for the Thanksgiving week-end was to make the case more visible. I showed John the choices of colored ribbons I had available, and he rejected pink (you think?) for this pumpkin version. I gave the black case a kind of belt. I joked with him if I was Martha Stewart I would have needlepoint hearts or flowers on it! We haven't lost Nanoo since!