iPod Madness

During the month, I “won” an iPod Shuffle at work. Actually, this was part of an award from October of last year, but it only caught up with me this month. It’s a great device, with simple controls – perfect for using while driving. It charges directly from the USB port of a laptop, and it has twice the memory (512M) of my old iRiver. But there’s always a “but.” It intermittently loses connection to my laptop. I took it to the Apple store, and because Honeywell purchased the device in January of 2006, it’s out of warranty. So I bought a second-generation Shuffle, got it home, and had exactly the same problems.

When I went to the Apple store, my first iPod wouldn’t talk at all to my laptop. Later that day I synched it on Jim’s Mac, and sense the it will talk occasionally to my laptop. For now, I’m going to keep both, but if I continue to have these problems, I’ll take the other one back and give the first one away.

Someday, computers are going to work reliably. It will be a freaking revolution. Seriously – so many large software projects fail. We don’t have a good way to visualize very complex systems and projects – like large computer programs, genetic codes, etc. Some day we will find a way and it will revolutionize many seemingly unrelated fields.