I can hear music….
Everyone loves music of some description, fact, according to me anyway! In fact music technology is probably one of the only technologies I’ve been able to keep up with, until the arrival of the iPod that is. I think it’s probably that juncture in my life where my phobia of all things apple began!
I can remember when I got my first mp3 player. It was a primitive little thing with about 126 megabytes of memory and it didn’t even have a display screen, but I loved it so. I can remember a friend showing me how to download music from the internet and how to put the files on the mp3 player. And then joy of joys I figured out how to put the music from my cd’s onto the mp3 player. It took a while but I got there in the end, after I figured out what wma stood for, and that wma files were the same as mp3 files!
When I got my laptop, the first thing I did was to put all my music onto it. Life with technology, music and me was good; we lived in harmonious bliss, until one day, things changed. I haven’t felt the same way about technology since that.
I was trying to get notes for some last minute cramming for an exam after Christmas last year, when unexpectedly and unprovoked, my laptop turned on me. I can testify that the blue screen of death is not a myth, it is a real thing, and it appeared on my beloved laptop screen. I tried in vain to resuscitate my darling laptop. I called a friend who works in tech support, no joy, no life to be had in the laptop. Then I bit the bullet and sent it off to be repaired. My laptop as I knew it was well and truly gone. So I sent it off for a lobotomy, or in tech terms, I had the hard drive replaced.
When my laptop came back after its little siesta, the first thing to occur to me was that everything that had been on it was gone. Worst of all, my music was gone. It felt like every talk I had ever been given about backing up work done on a computer was coming back to haunt me. But this was my laptop and I trusted it not do this to me. I felt so betrayed and I mourned the loss of my music. Well I mourned for a little while and then like the expression once bitten twice shy, I decided not to go through the process of putting it all back onto my laptop, for fear of it breaking again. And also I decided I wanted to get some kind of mp3 player with enough memory to hold all my music and then some!
So I’ve been listening to my friends and getting advice from them on what to get. Although some of them do make a good plea for things like the Zen, I feel that the time is right to face my Apple fears and buy an iPod. There is an Apple rep on campus, and they have kindly offered to help me get over this Mac-phobia of mine. They have already been giving me tutorials on how to use a Mac, it’s early days but I’m getting the hang of it. Plus I think owning my own piece of Apple technology might help me along as well. I’ve already lined up a trip to an Apple reseller to pick out my iPod. Wish me luck!
