I’d gone months without an iPod after my last one got stolen this summer. It was soooo painful. Suddenly the music was gone. The Podcasts were gone. All replaced by commercial radio. Now I remember why I got an iPod. But I couldn’t bring myself to go without lunch for a few months in order to buy one of the current big disk versions. It just seems too likely that the Apple phone or the true “video iPod” is likely to be out soon.

I spent a bit of time looking at the Nanos but in the end decided it was time for a Shuffle. The new ones are so tiny, but the experts say the sound quality continues to be better on the Shuffles than the Nanos or regular iPods. So I invested my $$ in a Shuffle a few weeks ago and have been slowly working my way back into my podcasts and coming to grips with having just a couple of hundred songs with me instead of the 6000 that live in my iTunes. And I was finding that I really loved it. I set up a smart playlist for the shuffle and used the autofill to swap new music into it as wanted from the smart list of 600+ songs. I found if I manually copied over the podcasts I care about and kept the list sorted by playcount, I could always get to the podcasts easily (set the Shuffle not to shuffle and then hit the Play button 3 times fast and it goes to the top of your current playlist, where all my podcasts and not listened to music ends up after the sort. Works like a charm).

But my worry was that this little bugger was too small and I would no doubt lose it, or my son would decide to stow it away in his treasures box. But it wasn’t him, it was me. The other afternoon when I got home I unplugged it from its car stereo adapter and dropped it into my shirt pocket. But then, apparently, when I reached over to grab some of the kids’ stuff from the back it fell out of my pocket and under my car. When I couldn’t find it later to plug it into the charger I figured I left it in my car. But the next day I couldn’t find it there. I was sooo annoyed with myself. But I didn’t get in my car again until the next day. As I pulled a U-turn from my parking space I glanced back and saw something small and shiny where my car had just been. I got out to check and sure enough it was my Shuffle. But, oh my. It was beat to hell. I must have driven over it. The top has a big dent in it and several good sized pockmarks. It was upside down so the big marks are from the asphalt underneath. The clip on the back is bent on both ends and bowed in the middle, evidently from the tire bending around this little pebble in the road.

I got back in the car to look a bit more closely and tried to imagine a scenario that would leave my new Shuffle covered under Apple’s warranty. I couldn’t imagine there was any way for that to be true. But it wasn’t flattened. In fact it looked OK considering I’d driven over it. Is that possible? Could this little thing actually withstand the weight of my Maxima? I plugged it in, turned it on, and practically jumped out of my seat when Leo and the cast of TWIT came booming out of my car stereo. Amazing. I’ve been using it for a couple of days now and it appears to be in complete working order. Do you suppose the guys at Smash My iPod would like to have this one?

Well, for now, its still mine…and still working! Did you like this? Then Digg it!

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Posted by DB in Opinion, Podcasts, iPod