Fun With Technology

The other night, I was bidding on eBay on a leather iPod case for my 1st generation iPod shuffle. Since I had a while to go before the auction ended, I thought, what the heck, I'll just go see what else is out there. So having just gifted my mom with an iPod Nano for Christmas, I thought, well, let's just see what's out there being auctioned off, so in the search engine, I typed in, "iPod Nano", and up came an auction that was very soon to close on a blue iPod Nano, 4th generation, that hadn't been bid up terribly high yet, and the auction was coming down to its final moments. I watched and debated with myself whether I really wanted another iPod since I have my trusty little 1st generation shuffle that does me just fine for what I need, but there was something so alluring about having something a bit more advanced that I sat there wondering to myself whether I wanted to jump in at the last moment and bid on it. As the moments wound down and the auction came closer to ending, I thought, eh, what the heck, bid and see what happens. A competitor bidder upped my bid by 50¢ and I thought, OK, I'll bid again, and the same thing happened. The seconds until the auction was ending were ticking away and so, in the last 30 seconds, I posted a maximum bid several dollars higher than the other bidder, and as luck would have it, I won, so now I am the proud owner of a blue 8GB 4th generation iPod Nano that came with very nice JVC blue ear buds as well. It cost well under what I paid for my mom's 5th generation 8GB iPod Nano, but then, it doesn't have some of the features that hers does. Still, it's got tons of room for music, videos, photographs and other goodies. It didn't come with an instruction book or anything so I am going to have to figure out how to use it just by playing with it. But I have managed to download my entire iTunes music collection to it with room to spare. This way, I can play whatever I am in the mood to listen to at work instead of just having only one playlist worth of music, which is all I can fit on my Shuffle. I have to choose beforehand what I am going to listen to for the day, but now, I don't have to do that. I've got my entire music library on my iPod Nano and I can pick and choose whatever it is I want to listen to, and that's a real plus. If I get to work and have a sudden yen to listen to, say, Mediaeval music, I can do that, or maybe Irish traditional music, or maybe a selection of folk music from various artists, or maybe Christmas music from the holidays! At any rate, I can listen to a heck of a lot of music on this new iPod, and that's always a big plus. Oh, and I also won the auction for the leather iPod Shuffle case, so I won two things in one night that were really quite reasonably priced and would have cost far more retail, which is what is nice about shopping on eBay. I am finally able to do last minute bidding and win auctions now that I have a broadband connection on a pretty powerful laptop, which is most nice - not that I plan on doing a lot of eBay shopping, but it is nice to know that when I want to, I can jump into and win last minute bidding wars, something I could not do on my old dinosaur desktop that was on a dial-up connection. Modern technology is just too cool!