Apple iPod 5th Generation Black (60 GB) MP3 Player

No, I don't mean the Nano. Compared to my old entertainment center, my shiny black 5th generation 60gb iPod is tiny.

I bought the iPod for myself for Christmas in order to save my husband the trouble of shopping. It was a brilliant idea. After ripping all my CDs as well as music from several different home computers to the iPod, I wrapped it up and put it under the Christmas tree.

After putting all the music I own onto my iPod, I still had some 54gb of space remaining free. For a brief period of time,a minute or two, I wondered if I had gone overboard getting the 60gb iPod rather than one of the smaller, less expensive ones available. But then I recalled how back in 1994 I believed I would never need more than an 8mb hard drive. Besides that, the 60gb didn't seem all that more expensive than the 30gb for twice the space.

Perhaps the only downside of owning an iPod is that you don't have any choice about where to purchase your music on the internet. To do it legally, you have to purchase music from Apple's iTunes.

I checked out iTunes and found it cost $1.99 for a single song download and I thought that was a little extravagant. After all, most of the music that I want is music I first paid for back in the 60s and 70s; first on vinyl albums, later on 8 tracks, then cassette tapes and finally compact discs. When would I have the right to listen to the music I'd been buying since childhood? For example, I first purchased the song, "Scarborough Fair" by Simon & Garfunkel back in 1968 on a 45 single vinyl. Just a couple of years later I bought it again when I purchased the album. Then in the late 1970s I found myself buying the song yet again, this time on a cassette tape recording. In the 1980s I bought it yet again in the form of a CD. And now in the next century, to download it from Apple's iTunes, it would cost me $1.99.

While I was exploring iTunes, I discovered the podcast. Podcasts are audio recordings that are, for the most part, free for download. They come from individuals as well as public broadcasting in both the U.S. and the U.K. I downloaded a few podcasts from the BBC as well as NPR.

When my husband, the genuis who had given me the iPod for Christmas, went out of town for a week, I was running our eBay business on my own. We ship out 60 or so packages a week so I stayed fairly busy. The most tedious part of the business is the wrapping of packages for shipping. I took my iPod out to the mail room (fancy name for our backporch) with me to work. While I was wrapping packages to send through the mail, I listened to free podcasts and the time zipped by. I became addicted to the podcast.

When iTunes started offering television programs for $1.99, I wondered why anyone would pay to watch a tv show they could see for free just by watching tv. But then I missed two episodes of "Desperate Housewives" in a row and found out I could download them to my iPod. The clarity of the video is much better than any I've seen anywhere else, including high definition televisions and movie screens.

There are video podcasts that you can download to your iPod for free and some of them are rather entertaining. I use my iPod just about every day and both audio and video are top notch.

There are a few things I would love to see Apple bring to the iPod interface. I would love to be able to manipulate folders on my iPod without having to hook it up to my computer.

I give the iPod an excellent