In the Parlance of Our Times

For those of you wondering, I showed remarkable restraint this holiday season and did not buy the XO laptop. It helped that every time the thought crossed my mind I was busy doing something else so couldn't hop online and place an order.

I'd have to say I feel a twinge of regret, though there were definitely more pressing things to spend $400 on this past month. It sure would be cool to have one.

Maybe they'll do it again next year.

They say you can never be too rich or too thin. You can't have too much RAM or too large a hard drive. But can you have too many iPods? I started wondering about this last week as I was syncing and charging my myriad devices.

We have 5 iPods of one flavor or another in a household of two people. I'm beginning to think this is too many.

We didn't plan to have this surplus. I had just one iPod for quite some time, and that same iPod, a 15 GB one bought in 2003, still serves well - though only in situations where it can be plugged in, as its battery is shot. I bought my second iPod, a gum stick style shuffle, 3 years ago. It used to spend its time in my purse or coat pocket, ready to jump into action when I found myself stuck in front of a computer taking 20 minutes to boot or on a Walmart run. But now it's been displaced by my new iPod nano, which Louise was eyeing fondly over Christmas while repeating over and over "I still don't see why you needed this."

Somewhere along the way we picked up two more iPods. One is the iPhone, so it's really more than an iPod and shouldn't count. The other was adopted after being nursed back to a semi-productive life - so it shouldn't count, either. I prefer to think of its acquisition as an act of mercy.

Only as I was syncing all of these, it seemed I hadn't used some of them much lately. The shuffle, in particular, hasn't seen the light of day for a while. In fact, now, a week after the mega-sync session, I'm not even sure where it is. I'm sure I'll come up with a use for that shuffle, assuming I find it again, but right now I'm not quite sure what that will be.

It's beginning to look like five iPods are indeed too many. Darn. That's going to make it tough to justify an iPod Touch purchase.

Give me time. I'm sure I'll come up with something.