So, this will be my first foray into the wonderful world of blogging...yay.

As I write this, I'm copying my CD collection - or, at least, the better (in both senses) part of it - to my new iPod. That will be a somewhat complicated process; since the iPod doesn't support FireWire, and my computor doesn't support USB 2.0, I won't want to use the direct route. Instead I'll load the music into the computor, transfer it to the external hard drive, connect THAT to my flatmate's laptop (whose hard drive is too small to store all the music at once - and I want to have to reapeat as few steps in the process as possible), from where, finally, I'll be able to get it to the iPod.

I liked my older one better. What did Apple really gain by taking away the FireWire support from the fifth generation iPods? A few MB of memory space? With a 30 GB drive, that doesn't seem like a good bargain to me.

My previous iPod - a third generation one - I lost during an assault and robbery in July. No, I was the victim. I got a blow to the head, that might've been serious, but didn't turn out to be. Just some blood loss, and a few stitches, that's all. Since, people have often chided me for not handing the iPod over when the robber first asked for it. Why didn't I? Well, for starters, I simply didn't want to lose it. I'm ensured, of course, but there's always the excess part, that I didn't feel like paying just because I was threatened.

Also, I feel somewhere that it's some kind of democratic responsibility to not give in to threat. I don't think the argument is all that clear, but it's something like this; by not giving in, I show my robber that I won't be bullied into submission. In doing so, I raise the stakes; he has to choose between giving it up, or retorting to violence to get it. The theory was working; he didn't WANT to bludgeon me - as he left me, he commented that "that was unneccessary of you, wasn't it?". In practice, however, it failed. But, had I given in directly, I would've contributed to a sense of "this is so easy, everybody should do it", I think. That's not an attitude I want to help to spread in society.