Oh, I give up!

Well, I gave up on the free iPod thing (although you'll note that I'm still using my referrer link, so if anyone wants to try to get a free one themselves, it could still, theoretically, work. But it's been about six weeks, and while a bunch of people seem to have signed up, only three actually completed the process. And then I also read this Wired article that basically says that, while they're still fulfilling orders, the site has just been so totally swamped (apparently due to the first Wired article) that they've got a HUGE backlog.

And in the site's own FAQ, it says that even after you've fulfilled all the requirements, you can expect to wait from six to eight weeks for the product to ship.

So I gave up, and bought one. A mini. Well, ordered one, but it's been shipped, and should be here sometime next week. It would have been here sooner, but I decided to be cheap and take the free shipping option. I figure I've waited this long, what's a few more days?

I got the blue one. Deciding which one to get was hard. It would have been a better deal to buy a bigger one, of course, but really, do I need 10 or 20, or even 40 GB of music? I think 4 will be just fine. And the mini was on sale, just a few dollars off, but it's the first time I've seen them on sale anywhere, so I don't think it's going to happen very often. The color was hard to decide on, too.

I was sort of tempted by pink, but I'm not really a pink sort of girl. The green one was kind of nice, but a bit weird (which is why I considered it), the gold one, too. Which really only left blue and silver, which was just too mundane. So blue it was.

I've spent most of the weekend playing DJ for myself and importing CDs into iTunes, getting ready. I've been scouring the house, going through CDs -- the living room, in my car, in Bob's office, my office (well, my office is actually the dining room, but there are a lot there, too) -- and I've currently got, let's see, 526 songs in it, or 2.13 GB, enough, iTunes says, for "1.5 days."

I've still got a pile of CDs at work, and those are a lot of my favorites, so I'm guessing I'll be at around 3 GB or a little over by the time I'm finished, which is just about fine. Plenty of music, with a little room to grow. I don't buy a lot of new music, I tend to listen to the same stuff over and over, but I've re-discovered a lot of stuff that I'd forgotten about.

I was a little selective toward the end, I didn't just copy over whole CDs, I just pulled out my favorite stuff. There are a lot of CDs that I did take everything, of course: everything of David's, which is, I think, eleven albums (nine solo albums plus the first two Dire Straits records); several Paul Young records, although there was a bit of overlap on those, so I culled the duplicates; three Marc Cohn albums, everything I own by John Gorka (he was one of the ones that I'd kind of forgotten about, although how I could have forgotten that voice, I don't know) (and I discovered there are two that I don't have, so I'll have to remember to get them sometime) . . .

And then there are some one-off things that I bought, but never really got into. There's a Counting Crows album in there, and Paula Cole, and a few odd ones off compilations and soundtraks. And Nickel Creek, and Richard Thompson, and Dave Alvin. And Aengus Finnan, who Joanna introduced me to. And Nick Drake, who I just recently discovered, although he has, of course, been dead for over thirty years.

What fun (not that he's dead, of course--the whole music discovery thing, I mean)! And now, with iTunes, you can buy just one track if that's all you want, rather than a whole album, so while I've only bought two songs so far, that's a pretty affordable way to get the odd track that catches my interest, whereas I've been very selective about buying whole albums for a few years now.

So anyway, I'm (obviously) excited about it. I fully expect that I'll remember more and more music that I've forgotten to put on it, and be forced to be selective about what goes on the iPod. But for now, I've got -- what was it? 1.5 days worth of music waiting for me.