I have heard of these families that have made a Three Bears type of investment in iPods. Papa bear has an iPod Touch. Mama Bear has a Nano. The littlest bear has a shuffle. As a techno geek who currently dwells alone, I guess I have formed my own family o'Pods, albeit for my own use. The GearWERKz iPod lineage is a trace that goes through many hills and valleys to bring the collection to where it is today. What is most interesting, though, is how the collection impacts how I listen to music.

At the top of the heap is the iPhone. I no longer carry service on the phone, so I refer to it as my iPod TouchPhone, or iPod PhoneTouch. I use it for listening to my Protected AACs and watching music videos. I also keep a short playlist of television shows on it. It is the first generation iPhone, so it is only equipped with 8GB of memory. Second in line is my iPod 80GB 5G. It is the longest surviving member of the collection, having replaced my first iPod, which I absent-mindedly left on a plane. Third is my iPod Nano. It is from the 3rd generation of the product, the version sometimes referred to as the "fatty". I use it as one of the two 'Pods I use for working out, and also for short trips. Lastly is the iPod Shuffle. The Shuffle is another workout iPod and replaces my first Shuffle, which I dripped sweat on during a work out and shorted out.

I listen to the most music when I am work, where I wear headphones and listen to music as much as I possibly can to screen out background noise. Even with my own office, my "open door" policy still lets in too much noise from the floor. The 80GB iPod is the only device that can hold my entire collection of music files, which is now around 30GB. However, it also has the worst battery life. I tend to be very poor about making playlists. Since I never know what kind of tunes I am going to be in the mood for, I prefer to just globally shuffle the entire collection at random, and skip a song to move on to the next randomly selected one if the first was something I was not in the mood for.

This works fine for the iPhone, Nano, and Shuffle, all of which are equipped with flash-memory. But the iPod 80GB is armed with a very small, spinning, hard drive. Constantly hammering the HD with new seek requests quickly drains the battery life. These days, despite the increased selection the iPod 80GB offers, it is seeing less and less use.

The one playlist I do keep up to date is my Workout Traxx list. Made for obvious reasons, this is the list, or some subset thereof, that routinely gets loaded to the other three 'Pods. So these days, I wind up spending a lot of time listening to very aggressive music. Because I spend most of my music listening time doing other work requiring some degree of focus, I tend to listen to familiar tunes. The most recent tracks I have downloaded from iTunes tend to get skipped at work. Giving them a whirl usually waits until I am at home or doing something where I can afford to be distracted enough to listen to the lyrics. I also wish I had more time and opportunity to listen to PodCasts. I can only listen to them when I am reading something though, or sitting still doing nothing, the latter of which almost never happens.

I was into music a long time before I ever bought an iPod. Had I not joined the military for my short stint, my second option was taking the music scholarship that I had earned to a small school in Atlanta's University Center. What I find interesting is how my mid-life dependency on tech has flowed into influencing even this part of my day-to-day behavior. I will definitely say that since moving to iPods and iTunes, I have definitely been listening to music way more than before. I am also downloading more music, and exposing myself to artists that I would have never heard before if the only means of listening to them was by buying their CD.

A Digital Audio Player, or DAP, has been part of my kit bag now for 5 years. There is certainly no going back to living, working, and traveling without one. I count my renewed interest in music as a good thing. There are a lot of artistic interests that I left behind in my childhood when I went off to college. If iPods are helping me recapture some of that youth, and having more than one of the little music players further accentuates that effect, then so be it.
- Vr/Zeuxidamas