Wed 27 Jul 2005
It arrived! 
My iPod Mini that is! I bought the silver 4 Gb one. I’m so far very impressed. It took no effort to fill it up with all the songs that I wanted. My previous music player supported WMA format, so most of my music was in that form. I buy CDs and rip them to my computer (I prefer to have CDs permanently) and before I used Windows Media Player to do it. I had a particularly rough time last week converting all the files and importing my library to iTunes. I was getting discouraged, even frustrated with iTunes and I began to dread using it as my default music player. My old music player had a drag and drop file transfer system, which I liked alot. I was sceptical that iTunes could give me a hastle free ability to transfer music to my new iPod. So I was cautiously optimistic (maybe even pessimistic).
Apple made up for it. When I ordered my iPod I was cheap and opted for the free shipping. It said 6-12 days shipping. I accepted that for saving $14. This is where I’m very happy. I recieved it today, THREE buisness days after ordering it! Now that’s service! It came by FedEx, and I was tracking the package on their site. It arrived in Toronto yesterday morning and in Cambridge last night. Here is the FedEx tracking:
Date/Time, Activity, Location
—————————————————————————————-
Jul 27, 2005
11:14 AM, Delivered, WATERLOO, ON
9:59 AM, On FedEx vehicle for delivery, CAMBRIDGE, ON
7:20 AM, At local FedEx facility, CAMBRIDGE, ON
Jul 26, 2005
5:51 PM, In transit, MISSISSAUGA, ON
6:57 AM, At dest sort facility, MISSISSAUGA, ON
3:45 AM, Departed FedEx location, MEMPHIS, TN
12:56 AM, Arrived at FedEx location, MEMPHIS, TN
Jul 25, 2005
5:31 PM, Departed FedEx location, ANCHORAGE, AK
4:48 PM, Arrived at FedEx location, ANCHORAGE, AK
10:27 PM, Left origin, SHANGHAI CN
10:18 PM, Picked up, SHANGHAI CN
1:40 PM, Package data transmitted to FedEx
That is pretty good! It got from China to my hand in 3 days. It cost me $225 CAN + tax, which is the student price. It was well worth is, and Apple far exceeded my expectations for service. I ordered it online because I was able to get the laser engraving done with my name and Class (Jeffrey Aho/Tron Eng ‘09). Thought it was good also for security issues. There is a serial number on it (wow it is really really small!) and iTunes registered it, so I figure there is some security there (because only iTunes can change up the music). The wheel is my favourite thing about it. It’s so intuitive and simple! It took no time at all to get used to it. Now that I got over the initial trouble with iTunes, they sync so well together that it only took a few minutes to fill up my iPod and then it was operational.
Since I now have music (Note: My sound card died a few months ago and I haven’t had the time to replace it), I’ll now add at the end of my blogs the song that I like most while writing my blog. This one is really great. I’m very impressed with the album (Move Along) which I blindly bought because I loved the first one so much. I suggest you go listen to it!
Currently Listening to: “Can’t Take It” - The All-American Rejects
July 27th, 2005 at 8:11 pm
Whooo iPod. For a while I’ve been considering getting myself one, but EVERYONE has one right now. So I don’t know… And I personally prefer the larger white ones instead of the minis, not sure why, but a hell of a lot more expensive. Which is probably why I’ve failed to purchase one of late.
Also, be noted that you may get charged customs from FedEx. Just make sure you get your address changed and you should be good though because you may be recieving an envelope from FedEx demanding more money.
But the iPod sure sounds good. Good times ahead for sure.
July 29th, 2005 at 6:29 am
Reading up on iPods before I bought one I found lots of people complaining about iTunes. I found it easy to use though. Converting and importing files was simple. It’s also the first program I’ve used to rip CDs that I’ve been satisfied with.
It tooks me 30 minutes to figure out how to work the wheel. Otherwise I haven’t had any problems using it.
July 29th, 2005 at 11:15 am
The biggest problem I was having in converting and consolidating my library was that when I tried to do it all in one big conversion, there was always some type of error that would interrupt the conversion. If you started it over again (by saying add new folder) then it would go from the beginning making duplicates of all the songs it had managed to convert before. I had to go through and manually select over 100 folders because of the interruptions it was giving me. And God forbid it threw an error in the middle of a folder, because then you had to manually enter the rest of the songs in the folder. It was a pain.