Does this mean I have to like those stupid commercials?

Last week, I officially joined the 21st century.

After fighting for hours to get a decent mix on the antiquated MP3 player that I take with me to the gym, I gave up. I sold my soul to Apple. Yes. I bought an IPod. But in my spending frenzy, I didn't buy just any IPod. Nope. I bought the crem-de-la-crem of IPods, the 60 gigabyte black monster that I now refer to as my toy.

And, as you might expect, I had to tack on the service plan, the case/armband/clip, and now I'm itching for the car radio adapter.

How could this happen you ask? Well, after looking for an alternative to my crappy MP3 player for months, I decided that if so many people have IPods, there must be something good about them. And, hell, the 30 gigabyte model was only $100 less, so if you're going to buy, why not get as much storage as you can for that price?

Little did I realize that as far as digital music is concerned, 60 gigabytes is pretty much a bottomless pit.

Initially, I was concerned how much my 60 gigabytes was going to last. Like most people, I have a pretty thorough CD collection. At the risk of dating myself, I have a few tapes from the ol' days, but for the most part have CD's. So, I began loading CDs onto my IPod.

At first, I was a little wary. After all, I wanted to be sure I had the "good songs." So I pulled the two to four decent singles off of most CDs and ignored the rest of the crap.

However, after loading a plethora of CDs, I quickly realized that the songs were taking very little space. Needless to say, I became a bit less discriminatory at that point.

I also realized just how many songs I own that are crap.

Record company bastards.

Anyway, three three-hour sessions later, after loading my entire CD collection, I discovered the wonder that is podcasting. I subscribed to podcasts faster than the President can pass the buck. I loaded every podcast I could find on every subject I could find that I thought I might, someday, be interested in. I looked at the capacity, figuring, surely I had made a dent in this little bit of black covered goodness.

Nope. Not a dent. Less than 4 gigabytes used.

When they say 15,000 songs, they mean 15,000 songs.

No wonder Apple is killing the MP3 market.

Of course, I couldn't sell out completely. I still use my black earphone rather than the uncomfortable white ones that came with the lifelong jukebox.

For my next adventure, I think I'm going to test my new toy's video capabilities...