Who Can Really Say?

Last year I posted some iPod Advice. Since that post is currently No. 2 in Google for the phrase "ipod advice", I thought I'd update it for those showing up almost daily for some help. Not that I'm Mr. Expert or anything.

But before I get to some thoughts, first some background. This household of three adults has eight (count 'em!) iPods. I have two 20 gig 4th generation iPods, one purchased in August of '04 and the 2nd in August of '05. The first one has a black and white screen, the second is an iPod Photo, with a color screen and the ability to deliver a slide show. Why two? I'll get to that.

One of my housemates (we'll call her "C") has 4 iPods, a 60 gig Video iPod, a 15 gig 3rd generation, a 4 gig iPod Nano, and a 1 gig Shuffle. The other housemate (we'll call her "K") also has a 3rd generation 15gig model, plus a 4 gig iPod mini . Eight iPods, and 139 gigabytes of storage!

Why so many? I can only speak for myself -- I had no plans to buy the 2nd iPod in August '05, but I was preparing to leave for vacation and my first iPod died, one year and 3 days after I purchased it, so I had no warranty protection. I was not happy -- but solved the immediate problem (going away for 10 days without portable music) by dumping another $300 down to buy my second iPod. In the year between the first and second purchase Apple had upgraded what one got for $300, so for the same price I got a color screen that can show photos.

In my earlier post I suggested that buying the extended warranty is a good idea and I still think it is. But do as I say, not as I do -- I still haven't purchased an extended warranty on iPod No. 2. You might consider, though, whether you should buy the extended warranty from Apple or from the vendor (such as Best Buy) that you might be using. I can't compare all of the differences between warranty offerings, but had I bought the Apple warranty I'd have had to return iPod No. 1 to Apple and I still wouldn't have had portable music for my vacation. Had I bought the extended warranty from Best Buy (where I bought No. 2), I could walk in the store, turn it in, and get a replacement on the spot, pretty much.

And by the way, iPod No. 1, as it turns out, wasn't dead at all. Upon returning from vacation, C (who is very Apple knowledgable) found a way to revive it by doing some online research.

One thing to keep in mind is that Apple keeps delivering improved iPods for the same price as the old model. Were I to spend $300 today on yet another iPod, I'd get a 30 gig Video iPod for the same money I spent to get a 20 gig black and white model in 2004 or a 20 gig color/photo model 4 months ago.

So which one is the best to buy? That all depends (mostly on you), but I'll give you my impressions. First, the Video iPod is pretty much all that it's cracked up to be.
C downloaded an episode of Lost from iTunes for $2. Last night we hooked up her Video iPod to my 32" CRT TV set (standard definition) and Lost looked and sounded great. The picture was very sharp -- had I not known the video source was an iPod I wouldn't have suspected anything.

Now, she'd also downloaded a copy of a Star Wars movie to compare the quality with Lost, and the movie was pretty poor -- bad enough to not waste my time trying to collect hot downloaded videos, even if I was so inclinded.

What I take away from this is that when you buy video from iTunes you're not simply getting something you can only watch on the small iPod Video screen -- you're buying something you can watch on a full TV too, which isn't a bad deal, considering that you can't generally buy TV shows by the episode that I'm aware of.

As for watching video on the iPod itself, I don't know that I'd really want to do that much because you have to hold the darn thing in your hand while you watch. I can imagine that getting pretty tiresome. But the screen is very bright, clear, and sharp -- the video looks great.

But even if you aren't interested in watching videos on what amounts to a miniature TV set you still get more space for music than you can shake a stick at, either 30 gigs for the $300 version or 60 gigs(!) for the $400 version. I've considered selling my two iPods on Ebay and then turning around to buy a video iPod myself if for no other reason than that a) it's got a larger screen which makes scrolling your music much easier and b) it has a 50% larger drive than my other models and c) oh hell -- it shows videos!

The Nano replaced the Mini earlier this year and in some ways this thing is even more impressive than the iPod Video. You can get up to 4 gigs of flash memory in a Nano, which makes it nearly indescructable. So the differences between the Nano and the full sized Video iPod is this -- $50 in price (between a 4 gig Nano and a 30 gig Video), 26 gigs of storage, and the fact that the Nano is very hard to kill. If you can fit your song collection into 4 gigs, or don't mind arranging playlists into 4 gig chunks that you can swap on and off the Nano using iTunes, then the Nano is for you. Oh -- and it stores and shows pictures on it's sharp color screen although let's face it, the screen is pretty small.

The Shuffle is the cheapest and smallest iPod, and it doesn't have a screen -- it's called a Shuffle because you dump songs on it and play them back in random order. Do you jog? Work out? Well then the Shuffle's for you -- it's probably more indestructable than the Nano. Buying for a child or young teen? You can't beat a Nano. Need more space or want the video capacity? Get the Video model.

I think I might have held a non-Apple mp3 player in my hand once, for about a minute. I think it was put out by Creative but I'm not sure. So I can't compare products outside Apple's line, except to say that in the look and feel department the iPod beat the other one hands down. Also keep in mind that one of the larger selling points for the iPod is Apple's iTunes store. I can't offer much about that either because 95% of the music on my iPod (2400+ songs and counting) is ripped from our personal CD collections. Apple's music is sold with a copy protection scheme the terms of which I'm not entirely familiar with. You can play the song on a limited number of platforms but I don't know the rules. Still, I'm told it isn't hard to strip the protection from the downloaded files if that's important to you for some reason.

So -- Mr. iPod Expert? No -- but I hope this helped.

[Linked to the Beltway Traffic Jam.]

UPDATE: Corrected an error -- we have eight, not nine iPods and 139, not 140 gigs of space. I credited K with a Shuffle that doesn't exist.

Posted by Peter at 6:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

'Tis the season to get pissed off at online vendors. Megan McArdle's wrath is vented at Dell, who took an order a month ago and only this week acknowledged they couldn't fill it because they cancelled production of the computer. Nice timing, Dell.

My adventure through the looking glass today was with TigerDirect. (Sorry Tiger -- you ain't gettin' a link from me). We ordered two low end digital cameras and although most of that cost is being carried by others, it was paid for with my card and so I got to be the official disgruntled customer. On Sunday when the order was placed the items were said to be in stock. I received a confirming email that night with a nice, friendly message from none other than the President of the company, Carl Fiorentino. There was no mention of stocking problems in the email, but the email carried the following statement: "Pricing and availability are subject to change up to time of shipment. We reserve the right to cancel any order before it is shipped."

Today I received another email, noting that the cameras were back ordered. The first customer service rep. on the phone, Arnold, was nice enough as he is paid to be. He admitted that at the time the order was placed their ability to fulfill the order was based upon their expectation that more cameras were on the truck arriving or arrived that day. Unfortunatlely, the trucks came and went but our cameras weren't on them. In other words, they said the items were in stock based upon an estimated delivery date. The next expected delivery date? This Friday.

You know, it's one thing to say you can cancel an order up to the time of shipment. It's another thing to say you can induce people to place orders with false information on the website.

Arnold was no help, of course, and so after describing to him in detail the violation of the Pennsylvania Unfair Trade Practices and Consumer Protection Law arising from the false information on the website, I spoke with Elizabeth. In the meantime we'd scouted out other cameras on the website and found a different model (in stock, no less!) which cost $30 more per unit. After wrangling with Elizabeth, those cameras will be overnighted to us tomorrow at their cost (increasing the cost to us an additional $15 per unit), with no additional charge for the overnight delivery.

Elizabeth essentially tried to explain to me that they process "millions of orders" and that "these things happen". Well bullshit. I can't say it any better than Mrs. Marcus:

Now what kind of an attitude is that, these things happen? They only happen because this whole country is just full of people, who when these things happen, they just say these things happen, and that's why they happen! We gotta have control of what happens to us.

TigerDirect wants to leverage all sorts of computer technology to streamline their business model and sell us stuff at cheap prices. I say more power to them! But I also say don't give me lame ass excuses when your system breaks down and leaves customers holding the bag.

And don't try to defend your inventory process that generates false information to your website when describing product availability, and then tell me "These things happen". Yeah, they happen -- they happen because you're system is cutting corners. My bank, for example, has a hold on the amount of cash equal to the cost of my order so that I don't spend that money before they have to transfer it to TigerDirect. How hard can it be for TigerDirect to do the same thing, placing a hold on the items I ordered because they told me they were in stock? Where's the warning on the product pages that says "In stock may not actually mean 'in stock'"?

And as for Carl Fiorentino -- well his email tells me "TigerDirect would like to sincerely thank you for your patronage and we want to assure your satisfaction on this and every order you place with us." My reply? "Peter would like to sincerely express that he has placed his first and last order with your company".

I should have stayed with Multiwave.com, Etronics.com, or Amazon.com, three vendors I've ordered thousands of dollars of stuff from over the last 5-10 years. Mr. Fiorentino -- you get no more money from me.

[Linked to the Beltway Traffic Jam.]

Posted by Peter at 6:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Over the weekend Powerline compared the leading Senate Democrats to Wile E. Coyote.

Today, they post an email from one Stephen Fossati, who worked with Chuck Jones on Roadrunner cartoons.

For the better part of ten years I had the privilege of working closely with Wile's creator Chuck Jones and in fact produced and co-wrote Chuck's final Roadrunner cartoon in 1994, so I would humbly offer that I am a fair authority on said erstwhile coyote.

Having spoken with Chuck about Wile more times than I can count, I can say with great conviction that your suggestion that the Murtha, Dean, Kerry, Boxer et al, position with regards to the GWOT and the war in Iraq, is appropriately analogous to Wile and to his inumerable, ill-considered and near fatally-flawed plans to catch the Roadrunner -- a good many of which resulted in him falling off of a cliff.

Chuck defined Wile in the words of George Santayana who said: "A fanatic is one who redoubles his effort when he has forgotten his aim." Assuming that the Dems' aims are to regain control of the House, the Senate and the White House and based upon their seemingly fevered attempts to discredit President Bush by mis-representing the success of the war, advocating for our withdrawal/surrender, and purposefully undermining our efforts/abilities to wage war on an enemy unlike any we have faced before, I think it's fair to say that the Democrats clearly meet Santayana's definition of a fanatic. And since it is Santayana's definition of a fanatic with which Wile's own creator described him, I would conclude that your comparison of our luckless, over-zealous and too-clever-by-half coyote to the leaders of the Democratic party, is not only correct but painfully (for the Dems), astute.

Based upon this, I expect them to turn to Acme Products any day now.

Posted by Peter at 7:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

For those really looking forward to a new President in January, 2009, just a bit over three years from now, consider the so-called front-runners for the Dems and Reps.

Exhibit A -- Hillary Clinton, who has recently endorsed a watered down anti-flag burning law and today, came forward in support of a nanny edict Federal law that would codify the voluntary rating scheme used by video game manufacturers. This smells distinctly of Bill Clinton's support for and signing of the Communications Decency Act of 1995, which was held unconstitutional by a nearly unanimous Supreme Court.

Exhibit B -- John McCain, who today supported President Bush's decision to spy on monitor communictions between individuals in the US and Al Quaeda:

Sen. John McCain disappointed Democrats on Capitol Hill on Sunday by defending the Bush administration's decision to use the National Security Agency to monitor a limited number of domestic phone calls in the wake of the 9/11 attacks.

Well, it's way, way too early to be thinking about 2008 candidates, but keep in mind please that "facism" comes in all forms. And then again -- it's not as if there isn't a grand history of fascism in the USA -- after all, Harry Truman nationalized steel mills during the Korean War under, in his view, the War Powers inherent in the President as Commander in Chief. And of course, FDR imprisoned hundreds of thousands of Japanese-Americans during WWII . . . . Or perhaps you prefer Abraham Lincoln's "unilateral"(!) suspension of habeas corpus during the Civil War?

Sheez -- W seems a piker compared to these all-time greats!

[Linked to the Beltway Traffic Jam.]

Posted by Peter at 5:57 PM | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (0)

No blogging, been shopping. If you want a good laugh, though, you can't do worse can't do much better than Foamy. Of course, if you want to keep your job, you might want to wait and view it from home.

UPDATE 12/16/05: If the brain fart I corrected above could be heard, then you'd know what it was like to be in my State and Local Poltics class that day in college, when I . . . .

Posted by Peter at 10:22 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

If you hate the Bush Administration, especially Cheney and Rumsfeld, you ought to be reading the Belgravia Dispatch.

And if you hate the Murtha's and Pelosi's, and want to win in Iraq, and you ought to be reading the Belgravia Dispatch

Start with the 12/12 post, and then scroll up to this and this.

Posted by Peter at 8:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

In the past I haven't updated posts very often, but with the reanimation of this joint in the last week I've done it several times. I don't know that I'll keep that practice up but keep an eye out for updates, at least for a while.

Oh -- and again, I changed the template. It's nothing special, but comments are always welcome. I think I like the darker one better.

Posted by Peter at 6:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

While I'm sympathetic to this argument, by so easily dismissing the availability of DVD's I think it tries to prove too much.

[Via Instapundit.]

UPDATE 12/14/05: Stephen Greene has more:

Shakespeare's tragedies still resonate all these centuries later because in the stories he told, the world was just ? it was people who were flawed.

Most of Hollywood's tragedies can't sell tickets even on opening weekend because in the stories they tell, the people are still flawed ? but only because the entire world is crap, too.

Shakespeare taught us that the wicked would get their just desserts. Hollywood wants us to think that we're all wicked, and deserve whatever we get.

Posted by Peter at 10:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Tookie Williams is dead. Captain Ed is a prominent conservative blogger, but opposes the death penalty.

Again, I oppose the death penalty, primarily on two grounds: religious and practicality. I don't think the state should take a life unless the person represents a present threat to the safety and security of the public, or a threat to the national security of the US or our allies. I also don't think that the death penalty saves us any money, and needlessly clogs our appellate courts with frivolous motions and delaying tactics. When we have the person locked up, he should stay locked up -- and I mean locked up for good, and none of the Club Fed treatment, either. Three hots and a cot, and anything else depends on how well the prisoner behaves. That to me settles the entire case in a relatively expeditious manner without having twenty years of legal motions keeping the case alive.

He received a lot of feedback from his post, including an email from a CA prosecutor, which he published in full, and which I excerpt:

A few examples to make my point: Suppose we have a career criminal with a long record of violent felonies, what we in California would call a "three-striker", who knows that he will be sent to prison for the rest of his life if he is ever caught committing a new offense. When he goes to rob the local convenience store, he doesn't want to hurt anyone - he just wants the money. But he also knows that, as there is no death penalty, he will face the exact same punishment (life imprisonment) whether or not he kills the clerk, the only witness to his crime. He would be a fool not to do so. If he happens to bump into a police officer on the way out, he may as well kill him too - there is no extra charge, so to speak.

If we somehow manage to catch the "three-striker" and place him on trial, it will be in his best interest to sabatoge his own trial by killling witnesses, jurors, prosecutors or judges. After all, if we can't convict him, he goes free. (Remember that scene from the movie Traffic, where the druglord walks?) And even if we manage to successfully prosecute him for one of these new murders, he will still only face the same life sentence that he was sure to get in the first place.

If we do manage to put a murderer like Tookie away for life, he can then kill anyone he wants to - inside or out of prison - with complete impunity. What are we going to do to him - give him two life terms? In California, we presently have something like 30,000 inmates serving life terms (29,999 as of 12:01 AM!) Most of them have little or no prospect of ever being paroled. I would not like to be there on the day that they are told that they have been given a license to kill.

Captain Ed further quotes a quote from a Brookings study:

Support for capital punishment is, of course, usually associated with the political right. But the lead author of a new paper making what might be termed the "big government" case for the death penalty is the noted liberal scholar Cass Sunstein. The paper draws in part on a study conducted at Emory University, which found a direct association between the reauthorization of the death penalty, in 1977, and reduced homicide rates. The Emory researchers' "conservative estimate" was that on average, every execution deters eighteen murders. Sunstein and his co-author argue that this calculus makes the death penalty not just morally licit but morally required. A government that fails to make use of it, they write, is effectively condemning large numbers of its citizens to death?a sin of omission like failing to protect the environment or to provide adequate health care. "If each execution is saving many lives," they conclude, "the harms of capital punishment would have to be very great to justify its abolition, far greater than most critics have heretofore alleged."

As for me, I think these death penalty arguments are strikingly similar at times to arguments about whether the FDA should consider a drug "safe". Whether it's good policy to release a drug into the market depends, among other things, upon the size of the good the drug might do against the size of it's adverse reactions, including serious ones. We manage that with warnings, my current favorite being that you should see a doctor if you're taking Cialis and your erection lasts more than 4 hours. But I digress.

How much good is done by the death penalty? Eighteen lives saved for each executed? Although I haven't seen the study, that argument strikes me as very strange. If it were true, then we could eliminate all capital murders by executing every 19th murderer, and after a while we'd have no murders. That may well be a very unfair interpretation, but that's what I get based upon the summary.

Rather, it's my understanding that studies have demonstrated the death penalty does not deter murders. I assume those studies control for various factors including comparing murders in jurisdictions without the death penalty with jurisidictions that have it. The CA prosecutor suggests 30,000 convicts will start killing not only themselves but other convicts too if the law is changed. Well maybe, I guess. I see the incentive point and all.

But regardless, it's hard to conclude the death penalty is more than problematic at best. When it's applied in the right case it satisfies our sense of justice. It's the "right case" bit that we'll never stop arguing or worrying about.

[Linked to the Beltway Traffic Jam.]

Posted by Peter at 8:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Tom Maguire at Just One Minute catches James Lileks in a rather emabarassing error.

From James Lileks' review of 2005:

A 2005 Rollick

...Superbowl Sunday. All other world controversies are temporarily knocked off stage by Janet Jackson’s nipple. So great is the nipple’s disruptive field, scientists wonder if it might have power to slow the spin of hurricanes or stop the mutation of deadly viruses.

Or perhaps the nipple can halt the passage of time. Dude, get over it, that was sooo 2004! The once-memorable Paul McCartney raised the tone of the 2005 Super Bowl.

Posted by Peter at 10:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Over the last month or so the Democrat's criticism of the Iraq War reached a crescendo, only to be followed by a near campaign style counter-offensive by the Administration. Should we bring the troops home "immediately"? Should we have a timetable? Is there a "plan to win the war"? What is it? Do we "stay the course"? That's what everyone's talking about, and it's all very interesting. But.

As I think forward, I can't avoid the conclusion that it doesn't matter. Oh, what happens in Iraq matters plainly enough, but that's not what I mean. What I mean and what I predict is that regardless of the circumstances under which we eventually withdraw our troops from Iraq, there will be no political consensus in the US as to what it means. My bet is that if and when we are ever able to leave the country, turning total control of it over to the new Iraqi Government and it's security forces, nevertheless there will be substantial criticism of the effort and the end game because there will be no consensus over how to define what it means to "win". If we can't agree whether or not we're "winning" today, why should we expect that we'll ever agree upon whether we won or lost?

For me, a stable Iraq that neither aids terrorists nor develop WMD's is a win. I think that's increasingly achievable but not inevitable. If we leave Iraq under a facade that this has been achieved, similar to the facade under which we left South Vietnam, and the country devolves into something that collapses into anarchy, then we've got a loss.

But in this limited sense, it doesn't really matter if Bush "stays the course" and turns out to be right to do so. The Republicans will claim victory and the Democrats will claim balderdash. Anyone thinking that some day Democrats will say "Gee -- we won. Who'd have thunk it?" is advised to not hold their breath. And if the Iraqi state fails when we leave, anyone who thinks the GOP will say "Gee -- Iraq's a mess now that we left -- sorry about that Chief" will be smoking some damn good shit.

I think some folks expect we'll have a resolution to this eventually, but I'm not one of them.

[Linked to the Beltway Traffic Jam.]

Posted by Peter at 6:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Incidentally, the French word for delay is retarde.

Via The American Mind.

Posted by Peter at 6:50 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The new look is due an upgrade to Moveable Type 3.2. Naturally, I had nothing to do with it. The upgrade apparently comes complete with a variety of templates, so in addition to whatever the blog is looking like as you read this, it may have looked different yesterday and may well look different tomorrow. You've got to walk around in a pair of shoes to see if they really fit, and so I will.

And, there's a bit of work to do too, to restore the blog roll from blogrolling.com, and to reinsert the tags for Sitemeter, etc. Now I'll have something to do tomorrow once the Giants jump out to a 4 touchdown lead on the Eagles in the 1st quarter.

UPDATE I -- 12/11/2005: When I said above "Naturally, I had nothing to do with it", I should have explained that I'm a neophyte at the back-end stuff required to run this blog -- my thanks to the web guruess responsible. For example, the upgrade included a variety of templates because she collected them -- not because they came with MT Ver 3.2.

Now that that's done, I get to bitch. Well, not really, but it is a pain to add in the additional bits of code to get Sitemeter to read the traffic here correctly. That's still a work in process. I've also noticed that apostrophes in the old blog posts have sometimes been converted into question marks during the import process. I don't know that there's anything I can do about that, shy of going through each prior post. More troubling, though, is that links to individual posts in the old MT 2.6 blog no longer work, because during the import process MT 3.2 renamed the individually archived blog posts. I can't believe there isn't a workaround for this, but I don't know what it is, short of running two blogs, one old and one new, so that the old one's links will remain for reference.

UPDATE II -- 12/11/2005: Apologies to the Eagles who showed up to play, but thankfully, not well enough to win.

Most of the changes are in place. The old archived post links have been restored, but they don't work as they should with the new templates, or stylesheets, or who the hell knows -- something like that. They look a little funky, but we'll figure that out, I think. The odd problem with the question marks and apostrophes will probably be fixed tomorrow, after I make my sacrifice to the HTML Gods. It requires the Web Guruess to 'fix a file" or re-confabulate the defibrilator, or something like that.

Let me know if you don't like the dark background I'm using at the moment. I'm not wedded to it -- maybe I'll leave it for the winter and get brighter in the Spring.

Posted by Peter at 11:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

John Lennon was murdered 25 years ago today. Lot's of links and stuff at Punditguy.

After The Beatles broke up 10 years earlier, all four of the "lads" put out separate work and for me, anyway, Lennon's was my least favorite of that stuff. What his death meant to me, more than anything, is that aside from laying John Lennon's life to rest, it also laid to rest any possibility that the Beatles might again perform, record, or play together. Sad stuff, indeed.

Posted by Peter at 6:52 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Who Can Really Say has made it to a number one Google ranking for the first time. Please note the search phrase.

Posted by Peter at 8:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)