The Day the Music Died

My iPod reached its limit, and the suicide gene took over. The real beauty of the iDesign is that they are made to be disposable, dying a few months after the warranty runs out. And coincidentally, the Apple Care plan for my iShuffle cost as much as a new one, so obviously I didn't purchase it. Luckily there is still internet radio, or work would be an abyss of sorrow (Garagepunk.com, is the current wavelength).

Now that I have been consuming mp3s on my commute for over a year, my addiction is in full bloom. I have to decide what to do; shall I just get another fix with a small, 512MB player, or shall I upgrade my addiction to a mainline full-strength 60Gig Pod(or equivalent)? As my favorite line from Basketball Diaries goes, "if you're going to snort it you might as well smoke it, and if you're going to smoke it you might as well shoot it." And thus Leonardo DiCaprio becomes a junkie, and I drop $300 to the Apple Corp.?

Another beef of mine, though not directly related, is with RapidShare. (Since I hate them I'm not going to link to them.) This website stores large files and gives you a link to download them, and it and similar sites are used by mp3 blogs and the like to host the files. They make their money by selling subscriptions to get premium accounts for faster downloads, multiple downloads, etc. So of course they have to have some means to make the free downloading limited, to convince you to buy the subscription. But RapidShare's system is so difficult, often I fail to make the download connect before the site believes I have "exceeded my download limit", and so I have to sit in from of the computer for multiple hours before I actually get the file. I call bullshit. There are plenty of other sites that do the similar business, but without all the crap. I don't know why mp3 blogs choose RapidShare. Maybe they offer some incentive on the uploading end. But for me, who just wants to download the music, they suck.