Recounting the events which took place that eventually lead to me jumping out of Windows and into a sider of Apple's. (See what I did there? Sider/cider. Is this thing on?) I bought a Dell laptop when Vista first came out. Straight out of the box it was crap. The battery was garbage almost instantly. Slow doesn't even begin to describe the performance. And if you've ever used Vista, you know the constant interruptions and moodiness that OS incessantly provides its users. The only good that came of that was trading it for a wireless rig for a guitar.
My Dell desktop decided that one day it would greet me with an error screen. After researching the meaning of the error, I found that an IDE cable needed to be replaced. That's simple enough except my harddrive didn't have an IDE cable connection. Microsoft wasn't able to even update the error messages! But, thanks to Zero Cool, (or is it Acid Burn?), he worked through the mess and got it working again. Thanks again. You are a genius.
Despite all of that, I still had some love for Microsoft. Honestly, the only reason I tolerated these ever frequent interruptions in functionality was that 1) I don't know how to use Linux and 2) I didn't want to be one of those high and mighty Apple people who don't even use their machine to even 50% of its potential. So, I hung in there with Mr. Gates. But, there was a final blow and it came in the form of the Zune. Yes, I was one of the last few people still rocking his 30 G black brick of an MP3 player. And I was quite proud to have resisted the cursed click-wheel. I stuck in there even when one update caused the Zune software to play one song while displaying different album art and different song title and artist. For example, let's say I was listening to "Orion" from Metallica's Master of Puppets album. Well, Merle Haggard's album art was displayed, Jay-Z's "Renegade" was listed as the song playing and the song's artist would be AFI. My solution to this was to re-rip all of my CDs. I've had to do this twice. Annoying doesn't quite capture the emotion I was feeling. Seething is closer yet not quite fully descriptive.
The final straw came when I was running one day recently while listening to my Zune. The music stopped for a bit and I figured that it was just a song with a long, quiet intro. Nope. My Zune was skipping songs with a display message informing me that all the skipped songs couldn't be found. ENOUGH!
Even though I bought an iMac a few months ago, I wasn't opposed to using Microsoft's products here and there. In fact, I wanted to keep using my Zune until it finally just wore itself out. But the constant headache of having to coerce my technology to work finally took its toll. I've had enough. I'm finished with Microsoft products and I am weening myself off my Windows dependency bit by bit.
So, I've joined ranks with the elitists. I don't consider myself as one though. I just want my equipment to work. That's it. With that, I decided to sell my Zune and all the accompanying accessories on eBay. But before shipping it off, I made sure to fill it with 30 gigs of Keith and The Girl podcasts. I provided a little drawing and note to go along with the Zune for that personal touch. Coupled with becoming Windows-less, I had to rip all of my physical media. Again. This time wasn't as frustrating as times previous. Why? The answer is twofold: This time everything will work properly, as it is intended and I'm not ripping my Dane Cook CDs to my Mac. I have a different plan for them.
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| One of the several stacks of CDs to be ripped. |
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| Zune, packaged with 30G of KATG. |