October 28, 2005

Hello Nissan, Goodbye Ford, Hello iPod

Filed under: General,Technology — Cory @ 1:56 am

For the past 10 years I have only really owned and driven two vehicles: a 1988 white Nissan pickup truck, and a 1994 blue and white Ford F-150. Neither of these vehicles had working air conditioners, and both were used and/or wrecked before I got my hands on them. Not having air conditioning in a vehicle doesn’t mean much to people who live in yankee states, but having spent a year in New Orleans and two years in Texas, it was beginning to mean something to me. Still, it wasn’t the driving factor for my decision to finally give up the trusty Ford. Indeed, it was the ridiculously high price of gas that caused me to look elsewhere for truck-love. Spending $250/month on gas is just plain aggrevating. This will not stand, man!

[ Return of the Nissan ]

I wasn’t really looking for anything, but a few weeks ago a guy at work sent out a message to the staff email list advertising a 1996 white Nissan pickup for sale, and relatively cheap too. Having previously owned one of these little trucks, I know how good they are, so I quickly wrote him back and arranged to have a look at the truck. The truck was in great shape and the price was right so I once again became the owner of a white Nissan pickup. The best part? After 10 years of driving in the heat, I finally own a vehicle that has air conditioning. No more sweating on the way to concerts in Austin, no more fearing summer road trips, no more wishing I had A/C!

[ Trusty Old F-150 ]But along with all that frosty happiness comes a little sadness as well. It makes no sense to keep two trucks, so I had to sell my beloved F-150. Despite its cooling deficiency, I really loved this truck. My Dad came across it when I was in my senior year of college after I neglected to put oil in the previous little white Nissan for, oh, a year or something (that was a lesson learned the hard way, sheesh). The old Ford saw me graduate college, towed all my personal possessions to New Orleans and back, carried me through the snowy Virginia winters, and made a heroic effort to get everything out here to Texas in the dead of summer (without question, those were the hottest 4 days of my life). It has been an extremely good truck, and I can’t say enough good things about that model of the Ford F-150. But, I guess at some point everything must move on.

As part of an incentive to sell the Ford, I sent out a staff email and offered my iPod mini along with the truck if I had a buyer before the weekend. Apparently iPods can be used to sell anything, in case you were wondering. Within an hour I had several inquiries, and a little over 24 hours later the title had been signed over and I had cash in my hand. [ Son of iPod ] “Cash”, you say? Yes, and what does a person do when he no longer has an iPod, but has cash? He drives to the nearest Apple Store and buys a new one, of course.

This time I opted for the recently released Video iPod. I’ve had two iPod minis and they were great, but I bought them for the size, not the price. Previous iPod models were just too big, I wanted something I could fit in my pocket. When the new iPods came out I heard that the 30GB model was much smaller, and upon visiting an Apple Store I was excited to see that this was true. In fact, its even thinner than the mini was. So, with all the cool new features and smaller size, I opted for the traditional iPod instead of the much smaller iPod Nano.

I’ve only played around with it for a few minutes so far, but I am already impressed. The only issue I have encounted involves playing “muxed” mpeg files on the iPod. I was trying out Podner for converting movie files into iPod size videos, and I found a FAQ on their site regarding the muxing issue. This macworld thread also discusses how to convert it into a non-muxed video. I don’t know anything about audio or video formats, so this is all new to me.

Sleepy now, good night.

• • •

7 Comments »

  1. The whole video converting is a pain in the butt… which is why I love TCPMP which will run on PPC and Palm… you give it ANY video file, no matter the resolution, bitrate, or format and it will play it scaled to full screen. Its awesome. http://tcpmp.corecodec.org/about

    Comment by Richard Y — October 28, 2005 @ 4:13 am
  2. I got one of the new iPods recently myself. I love it. If you want a free way to convert movie files to iPod format, check out Mark Pilgrim’s tutorials. Turns out he knows something about everything. :) I’ve ripped some of my DVD’s for watching on plane flights. Pretty cool!

    http://howto.diveintomark.org/ipod-porn-conversion-guide/

    http://howto.diveintomark.org/ipod-dvd-ripping-guide/

    Comment by Nathan — October 28, 2005 @ 7:41 am
  3. Thanks for the links, guys. This stuff is so cool!

    Comment by cwright — October 28, 2005 @ 11:25 am
  4. Wow. Life moves pretty fast. You don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it. I shall miss that truck.

    Comment by Andrew — October 28, 2005 @ 11:25 am
  5. I will miss ole blue truck, but i am kinda excited about riding a nissan truck again. Some of the best times in my life were had in nissan trucks….

    Comment by tate — October 28, 2005 @ 12:31 pm
  6. Did you ratchet down the iPod in the truck bed? Some bungees?

    Comment by Ken Kinder — October 28, 2005 @ 1:07 pm
  7. Hey! It was great chatting with you last night. Don’t forget to check out KEXP at http://www.kexp.org. Once you’re there, check out the Streaming Archive in the Archived Audio section. Specifically, I think you will love “Shake the Shack”, “Swingin Doors”, and “The Roadhouse”. Let me know what you think!

    Comment by Annie — October 30, 2005 @ 10:27 am

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