Resurrected iPod

Maybe it was bad karma. I’d been listening to a Guardian Unlimited podcast — The Ricky Gervais show — while driving back from the gym. It’s a cruel program that consists mainly of Gervais and Steve Merchant mocking the intelligence of someone called Karl Pilkington. Maybe Karl was playing dumb, I don’t know, but I found it unpleasant and should really have switched it off. It reminded me uncomfortably of how cruel my friends and I could be in our teenage years. I got home half-way through the podcast and put my iPod to bed (code: left it lying untidily on the kitchen table).

The next day my iPod failed to work in the car while I was driving up to visit a Buddhist group in a prison an hour away in Concord, New Hampshire. I assumed the battery was really sick, since the iPod failed to start even when connected to my in-car charger. Maybe when the battery’s really flat the 12v charger won’t work, I thought. But when I got home and plugged the iPod in to its “real” charger it still stayed dead. The screen was blank. I plugged in into the USB port to see if the Powerbook would give me some kind or error message. Nada.

I wasn’t too upset. Impermanence is a fact of life. iPods die. Stuff happens. I can live without my iPod, even if life would be a little less rich (often I listen to Dharma talks and science podcasts from New Scientist and the Guardian). And my LifeDrive can also play MP3s, although the sound quality’s poorer.

So although this wasn’t exactly a disaster I was pleased to find a simple solution online. I was able to reboot my iPod by pressing the “menu” and center buttons and holding them for three or four seconds, and now the iPod’s working again.

Still, this is twice in a week I’ve had to resurrect it. Last week it started skipping tracks and I had to reset the little rascal. No big deal, really. But two errors in a week suggests that it may be headed for the grave, which is a little sad. It’s brought me a lot of pleasure.

Well, that was a boring post, wasn’t it?

Did I mention I got this iPod for nothing? Thanks to Wired I discovered that a site called freeipods.com was giving away iPods. All you had to do, and it wasn’t much of a catch, I thought, was subscribe to a couple of special offers (things like join BMG’s CD club, take out a six-month subscription to the New York Times, that sort of thing) and then persuade a certain number of people (six, I think) to do the same thing. Once you had six friends who had signed up for two offers you’d get your iPod.

I promptly signed up for a couple of offers and started recruiting friends, or at least trying to. It was very difficult to get people to actually do anything, even though the free iPod program had been verified in the press as being genuine.

So I posted a link on a website and within a couple of months had six strangers help me get my iPod. I hope they got theirs as well. A couple of days before my 44th birthday my iPod appeared. It was a good deal, plus I got the 12 free CDs for joining BMG and a free month’s subscription to Audible.com. And I was in awe of how beautifully the iPod was made and how carefully it had been packaged. I think I was a Mac convert from that point on.

I’d assumed that the free iPod thing was now defunct (I mean it is a kind of pyramid scheme and sooner or later you run out of people to get to sign up for special offers) but it still seems to be running on a different site. I don’t know if the offer is the same deal.

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