Yesterday, Beck and I went shopping. We really shouldn’t do that on holidays, as we tend to spend waaaaay too much. But, we always have a great silly time, and I suppose that’s a fair trade off.

My travels took me to the Apple Store at West County Mall. This is one of two Apple Stores in town (the other’s at the Galleria Mall), and the one at which I bought my iMac. I went in looking for a durable case for the iPod and a set of headphones.

The case I ended up with was a silicone sleeve from XtremeMac (whose logo looks an awful lot like Handspring, the PalmPilot cloners). It’s nice, but…. (there’s always a but, isn’t there?) With the sleeve on, my iPod won’t fit in the dock. And it is hard to get in and out of the sleeve. So, the sleeve may go back to the Apple Store, and I may opt for something that either supports being in the dock, or allows for easy removal for docking. I like my dock!

I also picked up a set of Bang & Olufsen A8 Earphones. These are just about the sexiest earpieces I’ve ever seen. They’ve been getting rave reviews, and I thought I would complete my iPod experience by adding a pair. Now, I’d read that they were complex to get set up correctly, and that you really needed to dedicate some time to configuring them for your ear properly. Yesterday, I did that, and found them to have great sound, really reproducing the highs extremely well. Nice, nice, nice.

Until today. I took the A8’s and my iPod to work. At work, I listen to music most of the day (when I’m not in meetings), and pop my headphones on and off frequently to answer the phone, handle walk-up traffic, etc. The A8’s just werent’ made for that. It takes a few minutes each time to get them “just so” in the ears again, and after a while, I felt like all I was doing was playing with two things sticking in my ears. Ugh.

At lunch, I went to Circuit City looking for earphones, and found a set of Sennheiser PX 100 collapsible earphones that were nice. I’ve always loved Sennheisers, and have owned since the yellow earcup days of the early 80s. As my home headphones, I have a pair of HD 570s that I just love. I had no idea that Sennheiser made headphones as compact and portable as the PX 100, but I had high confidence that they would be terrific.

I wasn’t disappointed. These things sound great! I guess the lesson here is not to be distracted by sex appeal, and to go with what you know. Sorry B&O!

$2.089

Like a kid listening to Santa’s yearly trek on the radio, I’ve been watching the journey of my little iPod as it made its way from Shanghai through Anchorage to … Indianapolis?!

I was shocked to see that it had landed and been delivered in Indy today. Frantically, I hurried to the Apple orders site to see if there had been some kind of cross up. And there was. The automaton had boofed the FedEx tracking number, and when I put the right one in … my iPod was here! A little side trip to FedEx to pick it up, and joy was had in Ellisville!

Here’s the lesson kiddies: If you weigh half a kilo, and are in a box about the size of half a dozen CDs, you too can travel from Shanghai to St. Louis in two days!

It’s a thing of beauty, all white and silver, and the engravers even got the mantra on the back correct. I’m still setting it up, and letting it charge — I suspect tonight will be filled with some learning and playing!

$2.119

Watchful viewers of this site will notice that the simulated back of my iPod in the entry a couple of days ago has changed. It now says “60GB” instead of “20GB”. Here’s what happened.

Yesterday, Darla mentioned that if she had thought longer about my mantra on the back of the iPod, she would have added a little bit. I’d already been thinking about changing my order to an iPod Photo, so that was a good excuse! 🙂 Mostly, I wanted the larger drivespace, and it would give me some ability to store photos if needed, although some of the capabilities I want aren’t quite there…. yet. So, off I was to the phones.

I had a great conversation with Apple employee Thomas, who informed me that the best way to do this was for him to cancel the iPod order, and then for me to get on the web to re-order. Unfortunately, the iPod dock I ordered was already on the way, so there wasn’t much we could do about that. So the cancellation was in place, the re-order of the 60GB iPod Photo was done, and I was giddy.

This morning, I got an e-mail indicating that my 20GB iPod would be upgraded at no charge to an upgraded model. Upgraded model? My 20GB iPod? Didn’t I cancel that order?

Another call to Apple, this time with Apple employee Kimberly. Kimberly could see that the order for the 20GB iPod had been cancelled, so no problem there. I asked her about the upgraded model my e-mail had mentioned. Apparently, the 20GB model had been upgraded to a color screen, and photo capabilities. No extra charge for this functionality either!

She also mentioned a pricing action on the iPod Photo…. it went down by $50. Sheepishly, I asked if I would get that discount, and she said I would. Ya-hoo! She even went farther, noticing that I had a dock on the way from the original order, and that I had a new dock on order with the iPod Photo. She offered up a free return on the “old” dock on Apple’s nickel. Sweet, sweet, sweet.

So what happened today at Apple? Well, all regular iPods (not Mini or Shuffle) now have color screens and photo capabilities, along with podcasting capabilities. The 30GB iPod Photo is gone — in fact, there are no iPod Photo models any longer. All the white models are just iPods. With the lowered price on the 60GB model, there’s only $100 difference between the 20GB and 60GB models, and capacity is the only difference between. Why wouldn’t you cough up the extra C-note and triple the capacity?

So, Apple not only did a cool thing, but they did me right with my order that happened on the cusp of this change. Since I ordered a model that didn’t change, I assume it’ll come in quicker than the 20GB revised model would — looks like my ship date is July 5th, so I might even have it before the following weekend.

I gotta tell ya, I was expecting all kinds of trouble in making this change, having been accustomed to the evil empires that big corporations usually are. This was easy — it just worked!

$2.159

This weekend in my Apple-world, I’ve performed some coolness, some of which I’ve wanted to do for a long time in Microsoft-land, and couldn’t quit get to.

First off, I’ve added an iSight-based webcam view to the sidebar. While I don’t expect you to see Elvis, Jimmy Hoffa or Visitors, I do expect that ocassionally, it’ll be fun to see me hacking my way through some thing or another. This comes from EvoCam, sold by the folks at Evological. It’s a neat interface, allows for all kinds of options and seems to do everything I need it to do. Just gotta get more creative with the iSight, and get the lighting a little better at my desk.

I’ve also added a piece to the sidebar that shows the last five tracks I’ve listened to with iTunes. That is something I always wanted to do with Windows, and couldn’t come up with a good way to do. I’m sure someone has skinned that cat in the Land of Gates, but for me, it wasn’t straightforward. However, with a little tool called Kung Tunes, I can bring this list to life, and put it right in the sidebar. Cool, cool.

The last big deal this weekend was a new enclosure for the 400Gb external drive. The fan in the ADS enclosure was making just a bit too much noise for me, so I replaced it with an Acomdata 3.5″ firewire enclosure that CompUSA had on sale this week. The Acomdata is a very nice enclosure, solidly built. The only thing of note is that there is no fan in the back of the enclosure — there’s a cutout however. So, if the drive seems like it stays hot, I’ll install a little fan in it.

So, what to do with the ADS? Well, a little experimenting. I installed the Sony dual-layer drive from Beck’s old machine in the ADS enclosure, daisy-chained it off the Acomdata, and OS X saw it with no problem. The biggest thing that it seems to help with is ripping my CD’s. This drive will rip easily at 18x, while the drive in the iMac only seems to rip at about 10x-12x max. That’s a big difference across 300+ CDs!

I guess the next thing to try to figure out is if I can rip from both drives at the same time — probably a challenge with only one processor. The other challenge is to get that goofy “One or more of the songs you have selected to import have already been imported” prompt to go away. There’s no way I’ve been able to find to set iTunes to default to always “Replace Existing”. Surely there’s a path for this, as I don’t wanna have to keep answering this for almost every disc!

Anyway, fun and games at the ranch this weekend, and some little successes. Next week, I’ll work on getting the automation for the photos completed. Then the Photo Archive can begin catching up.

Tonight, I took my next step down the cultlike path that is Apple-dom.

I ordered an iPod.

Yeah, yeah, I know that there’s a gazillion little snippy reasons maybe to not order one, but there’s one real good one in favor of it: I wanted one. Listening to music is one of my favorite pastimes that I love combining with other activites. When I’m coding, I’m listening. When I’m mowing, I’m listening. Becky says I have to have music on all the time, and there’s probably some truth to that.

The Apple online store had a deal where they would engrave it for free, and the image you see is the preview image they gave me of the little thing. A little mantra-like reminder for me, wherever I go.

So, the massive re-ripping effort has begun, with well over 300 CDs to rerip into AAC/192Kbps format. The reward is better sound, and only taking up a skosh more space than what I was doing before (MP3/128Kbps). With the 20Gb iPod though, I should be able to carry a lot of my favorites with me.

So, why’d I choose that model, especially when there’s more photo-oriented models out there? Well, the lack of support for Canon RAW files pushed me away from the iPod Photo, although the 60Gb drive was awfully attactive. The battery life wasn’t quite as good as the regular iPod either, and while you could bring in images from media (CF, etc.), the interface to do that was only USB 1.1, and that’s simply not fast enough when you’re talking 4Gb microdrives!

The iPod Mini also had my attention, but for 50 bucks more, the regular iPod has 3.3x the storage space, a little less battery life, and only weighs a couple of ounces more. Capacity, ultimately, won the day, and made my decision pretty easy.

Of course, the $30 coupon through Apple didn’t hurt any!

So, watch out world — here I come, synced, listening, and enjoying myself!