today was the day

BLUE LINE TRAIN 362 -- i finally got my first paycheck this friday, so i decided to celebrate this weekend. on friday, shalini came to the office after work, and i took her to a french restaurant in Old Town Alexandria - the whole three course meal and bottle of wine. then saturday came.

at around 10:30 in the morning (i've been waking up a lot earlier than Senior Week), i decided to go to Pentagon Center to the Apple store. it was finally time to get an 80GB...in black of course. i've been holding out for a while.

i had the original IPod mini which was sweet, but it was always difficult to only choose 4GB of songs to put on there. so the mini lasted until i was in Rome when it literally fell a part. a couple of weeks passed, and it was terrible because i lived 45 beautiful minutes from my class room, and it was weird to walk that long half asleep without the Stones or Otis waking me up. i couldn't take it, so i bought this cheap 50 euro mp3 player, a T Sonic, which i still have. it was nice again to have music, but the T Sonic took too long to scroll through songs. when i was back at home, it happened to be time for an upgrade for my phone. i went to the verizon store and chose the Chocolate that holds 2GB of music. i thought this was amazing because i always hating having to carry around a cell phone and mp3 player and keys and wallet. i also liked it because a lot of times i would be listening to my mp3 player (loudly as usual), and i wouldn't hear my phone ringing. the Chocolate was great because if i got a call while listening to music, the music was pause automatically when i picked up the phone and would resume when i hung up. my happiness only lasted so long though. the music program that Verizon phones sucks because when i upload my music, all of the songs lose info on the phone. so i figured out that the only way to organize songs on my phone was to rename them by artist and song such as "beatles-taxman.mp3." another problem was that i organize my music on itunes with all of the playlists and everything, and it was a pain to organize it on that and the Verizon program. obviously, i was impressed with the IPhone, but it's only for AT&T for now, so i waited for the new IPod Touch and thought about buying Lou's. he told me about one annoying feature though. when the backlight turns off after a few seconds, you have to unlock the IPod and then press the forward button to forward through music, and since it's all touch screen, you can't tell where the buttons are without looking at it.

so it's 10:30am, and i decide that i'm ready. i ready to have all 20GB and 4000 songs on my hip. not only that, but i get to put all of my favorite tv shows and movies there too. i've got a 20 min metro ride every morning so that works out perfectly. i get to the Apple store which is packed on a Saturday. i find this girl who worked there and told her i wanted the black 80GB IPod Classic, and all of a sudden, she lifts up this glass case, and there it is! i didn't see any cash registers, so i asked her where to pay for it, and she said, "Oh, right here." she whips out this handheld machine, and swipes my card and asks whether i want the receipt printed to emailed to me. i was probably in there for 8 mins. it all happened so fast that i thought i had made a mistake.

but i got home, put all of my music on there, and tried to put all of my shows - the office, 30 rock, entourage, undeclared, the wire - on there but couldn't figure it out. apparently, video IPod's only take MOV and MPEG4 files which is dumb because all torrents and video files these days are AVI. so eventhough i'm in music and video heaven, it was a long and painful road to get there.

-Tenn

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