When I'm listening to music, I can concentrate better on onerous tasks like packing and cleaning the apartment. Both my Palm PDA and my Nokia 770 can play MP3 and Ogg Vorbis files, but I can't put a headphone in the Palm, or it'll shut off the internal speaker for about two weeks, thanks to a nifty short in the jack. And the jack on the 770 is perfectly placed to be as inconvenient as possible in a shirt pocket.

So I went looking for a cheap, small MP3 player. I'd been hoping to pick up another iRiver player, as I like their user interface, but Best Buy no longer carries them (the salesdroid said she thinks they've gone out of business). It looked like SanDisk was making a similar item — roughly equivalent in size and shape — and their 1GB model was $30 cheaper than the 1GB iPod Nano. The only apparent downside was that it took AA batteries. Since I buy AA and AAA batteries in 64-packs, I figured it would be a while before the batteries ate up the price difference.

The interface was truly horrible. While it would let you create a hierarchical file system in its memory, it ignored this entirely when it came time to play the files; you could have them all lumped together in one giant list, or arranged by artist, album or genre. And if the artist name was different in the ID3 tags (for example, "The Calais Consort" vs. "Calais Consort"), it created two different Artist folders. And it would support one solitary playlist, so if you wanted one collection of Renaissance music, regardless of artist or album name, another for humorous Canadian bands, and another for big band swing, well, you were just out of luck. And the font was excessively large for the tiny screen, showing just three files at a time.

Back it went.

I bit the bullet and got me an iPod Nano, marking my first purchase of Apple hardware since my first computer, an Apple ][ (no bloody plus, e, c or lc). And the first thing I did with it was to stick Rockbox on it so it'd play Ogg Vorbis files as well. (I'll admit, I was tempted to put iPodLinux on there instead, but no — it's not stable yet for the Nano. Plus even I think that might be going a little overboard.)

While it's a snazzy little device, I'm sort of regretting that I got the black one; it looks beautiful right up until you touch it and leave fingerprints all over the glassy and mirrored surfaces. That and the fact that there's no anchor point for a lanyard are the only drawbacks I've noticed so far. Oh, there's a third one: if you put the foam covers on the earbuds, they hide the "R" and "L" symbols — but a little red enamel paint on the right one will remedy that easily enough if I decide to stick with the "Mug-Me White" earbuds.

I also got an iPod charger/FM transmitter for the car. Luckily I have an understanding (and pretty) wife who won't begrudge me my last purchase before the move. :-)