Idlemind - nickcoster.com
Future gazing from a quiet corner of cyberspace.

I just want to write something. It has been too long since i have written freely. I feel overwhelmed with everything that is going on in my life. There just seems to be no time to catch breath. We are working on something all the time. I keep thinking that maybe soon there will be a chance to catch up. But there won’t be. It is that simple.

The question that I try and deal with is what to do next and get it done. I find it hard to juggle everything, but there are no choices, just more things that need to be done.

That said it is good just to be writing this. I’ll try and add something more uplifting tomorrow.

Some people are afraid of heights or small spaces or bugs or any number of things. I am afraid of going to the dentist. I can’t even remember why. I can’t recall any particular experience that has created this fear, but i can’t recall any particularly positive ones either.

For whatever reason every time that I have been to a dentist, there has been a cavity that needs to be filled, a tooth that needs to be drilled and a needle that needs to be applied. (not necessarily in that order.)

In October, while I was overseas, I could feel a hole in one of my wisdom teeth. I knew that I couldn’t delay it any longer, but I don’t have a regular dentist. I don’t even have an irregular one. The frequency of my dental visits is almost measured in years, not months. (For accuracies sake I didn’t say decades but it wouldn’t be too much of a lie.)

Finally, over a month after my holey discovery, I defaulted to the most local dentist, just down the road. To my credit this was not a pain based decision, but I knew that pain was going to be inevitable if I didn’t do something soon.

The dental surgery was clean, new and friendly, but event the act of getting x-rays and a proper dental clean had me feeling panicky. That was the easy part.

At the end of the week the results were in….

WOW. I will be going back to the dentist for a while, but it was time to start with something. The bastard tooth that started it all. The recommendation was to pull it out and it’s buddy on the other side. My last dentist has said the same, but is never went back. Fear. It was easier to run.

On Tuesday this week it was time to stop running. I stepped up to the surgery again to have the offending teeth removed. It went well. There was NO pain. I couldn’t believe it. I practically sobbed when it was over, so great was the relief.

It is a testament to the power of fear. What else can I handle that fear had stopped me from taking on?

I just upgraded the site to the latest version of wordpress. I thought that I had lost the lot for a moment there and the site was down for about 3 hours.

Obviously it is back now. Phew.

Well it has been a pretty good year. A lot changed and a lot stayed the same. It has been a while since the last post, and there are some ipod updates that I need to make, but i’ll get to that later.

The fun part of what I am doing right now is that I am blogging this directly from the bus on the way home. COOL!!

Not far from my stop now so it is time to publish the post..

On the ‘Apple Matters’ blog today Chris Howard discusses the success of the iPod and the decline of the physical media that music is delivered on. Although this is significant I think that Apple has done more and less to drive this trend.

As Chris states they were not the first to launch a flash or hard drive based music player. Around five years ago I have mixed memories of shelling out AUD$700 or AUD$800 for a Creative Nomad 6GB Jukebox hard drive based player. This ‘little’ baby was basically a 3.5in hard drive repackaged into a portable CD player form factor.

From a technical perspective this gave me everything that the iPod Mini provides. This was happening during Napsters heyday so there was no shortage of easily (if not legally) obtained music, it supported playlists that could be managed via the device and on the synchronised PC. But it never really took off. Why?

• It was still quite big and bulky. Bulkier than even the CD players of the day.
• The interface was awkward and required concentration to navigate through.
• The process for loading up songs and managing playlists was a learning experience.

These are exactly the areas that apple have addressed with the iPod, in all it’s incarnations to date. They created a pocket sized device, with a simple tactile user interface and developed software that for both Mac and PC that was easy to use.

On top of all of this, apple then made it cool to geeks and non-geeks alike. With fun iconic advertising and the white headphone wires they made their devices visible even when they were stuffed in the oversized fashion jeans pockets of their owners.

So where to from here? Well with digital formats the device IS the media. It is the thing that you carry with you. What is changing is how you use it and what you put on it. iTunes is influencing this with their track by track downloads. Podcasting has the potential to listening habits by consuming peoples listening time with non record label content.

The big step in bringing portable digital music to the masses has been made by apple and I thank them for it. The next battle however is for the time you spend listening to it. Do you just randomly shuffle you 60GB of music files? You may never listen to the same track twice! I have practically left the CD loaded music behind, as I listen to a backing up stream of podcast content.

So what will you be listening to today?