the Unexpressed Advantage

beautiful

small

really small (not my hand)

did I mention small?

And it does other stuff too (like play music)...

Well Mr. Nottingham, here's your post, I'm a slacker getting it in at 1 am on TUESDAY. Crud.

For the last two days I've been enjoying my new Ipod Nano. As you can see from the pictures, it's really something else. On the one hand, it’s just another ipod, those have been out for years. But the magic of the Nano is its size (very very small) to capacity (really really big) ratio. It weighs in at just an ounce and a half, is as thick as 5 credit cards, and about as big as a business card – if you put it on its side and cut 20% off one of the long ends. Despite the sleekness of the nano, it packs a storage punch with 4GB of space for your music, photos, whatever. Apple tells you that’s 1000 songs (turns out it was 760 for me, but my songs are bigger because I encode at a higher quality, thank you Dave Lim).

I needed an mp3 player for working out and studying. Some people tell me that they need to read in absolute silence, I never was that way. I’ve always been able to turn music into “white noise” and something to accompany good reading and writing (I think I’m listening to Shakira on my new pod now). I never really hear the lyrics to songs, that’s why it’s really funny when you here me sing some 80’s song like “Total eclipse of the Heart” by Bonnie Tyler:

e.g. Dan version

“Nuthin I can do just to make it a ways
All I’m really feeling is the way in the grey
Nuthin I can do,
Total eclipse of the heart (ding do ding)

Actual Lyrics

Once upon a time I was falling in love
But now I'm only falling apart
There's nothing I can do
A total eclipse of the heart

You get the point. I can turn conversation into white noise too, but its essential to have music in case the person sitting next to you happens to be a female UBC freshman with a cell phone. In that situation, the white noise option simply will not work, she must be drowned out. I also needed something small and durable for those long bike rides and skating treks.

So that left me with a few options concerning study/workout music:

1. Portable CD player – Pros: none | cons: I don’t have any CD’s. Too Bulky. Batteries die, skips when shaken etc, etc…

2. Minidisc Player – Pros: very small. Discs hold a few hours of music. Remote control | Cons: getting music on requires real-time recording, I don’t have any “real-time”, but I do I have this huge mp3 collection…

3. Plug headphones into my laptop – Pros: huge music collection at my fingertips | Cons: I tend to avoid bringing my laptop with me whenever possible. Even though it’s “ultra-portable”, unless I know I’m gonna use it, it’s just too freaking huge. It also doesn’t work very well on the bike.

4. Portable Cassette player – um… right (I do have one though).

So an mp3 player was the only option. After quite a bit of time searching for the perfect match. I landed on the Creative Nomad 512 MB portable. Pretty good: good storage, doubles as flash drive, FM tuner, voice recorder, etc…

…Then I was walking through Futureshop one day and laid eyes on the nano. It was love at first sight. How could something so small, elegant, and sleek hold SO MUCH? The Ipod of choice cost about 3x the Nomad,. But it held 4GB, 8X as much, and enough to hold pretty much half of my overall music collection. After a couple of weeks contemplation, it was clear that the only option was the Nano. And so yesterday I went off and did the deal.

And here’s the rest of the magic, the sound. It’s incredible. I think I understand why people are walking around all over Vancouver like ipod zombies, earphones in their head and completely unaware of any surrounding stimuli. It’s because Ipods sound really REALLY good. I don’t know how apple does it (the nano uses the same Audio Codec – def: sound producing thingy – as former ipod models) but they do. I took a walk last night, listening to dave matthews, it’s like life with a soundtrack…

I don’t know if that’s a good thing or a bad thing, but we’ll leave that for later discussion. For now let me just say that as far as “white noise” producing devices go, I’m pretty sure I just got me the best one made.