Alright, so I got an iPod a few months back. I've gotta say, these fuckin' things are not worth what people pay for them. Complaints:

The controls on it are total shit. The goddamn click wheel is way too sensitive, and the sensitivity isn't adjustable.

The backlight brightness rivals that light at the top of NERV Headquarters. You can change the timing of it, you can shut it off, but no, no reason why you should be able to control the fucker's brightness. With backlights being the inefficient powerhogs that they are, I usually end up just keeping mine turned off all the time to save battery life. I also saw recently that Apple is making the screen brighter in the next gen iPod for no apparent reason. Thanks, Steve.

The "shuffle songs" (randomize) should be under the "music" menu, not the root menu.

It's lame that it does all of your organizing for you via ID3 tags and gives you no other control on how music gets organized.

Trying to fast forwarding more than a couple tracks at once makes the damn thing look like it's locked up on you, but nope, it's still recording every click of the button and will move things forward once it gets it's shit in gear. And there are undoubtedly other little issues I could go on about that aren't coming to mind at the moment.

That's just the device itself, though, and then there's iTunes, which is also a piece of shit. I fired up iTunes once to make sure that the software initialized the Pod correctly. As I started it up, it asks me if I wants to let it search for music. I'm like, fuck it, do what you gotta do. It implied it would only search for music, and I seem to recall just under the "My Music" folder as well. But no, it proceeds to find every MP3 on my hard drive and start dumping it to the iPod. Hey, fuck you! Don't do shit without me telling you! Some retards may like this automation (shit, tons of them must for the iPod to be so undeservedly popular), but I'm a goddamn engineer and I want to do it myself. I believe I saw somewhere that you can change things so that it doesn't automatically update the device, but even still, automatic updating being the default is lame.

That was the only time I used iTunes, and I'm not planning to use it ever again. No, I don't give a shit about their stupid store. Since that first unpleasant experience I have used gtkpod under Linux. It's not a stellar interface, but it's not bad, either.

The latest iPod insult can be found here. I would so fucking buy one of those for my iPod, but it's only available for the Nano. I have the 30GB video iPod. Assholes.

Despite the dumb-ass name and bullshit posturing on their web page, I may have to get one of these cases instead. I found out about these ones in an article which included the iKitty, and they had this to say about the YoTank case:

YoTank introduces a new line of military-grade digital audio player cases that can withstand Â?a RPG or mortar shell explosion 85 percent of the time.Â? Cases are machined from solid blocks of aluminum and fit the iPod Nano/Video/Mini or Creative Zen Vision:M players.

I don't know where they're getting that from, but if that's the case, hell yeah, I need one.

So at this point you're like "Ha ha, you stupid asshole. You bought the iPod just because you're a goddamn snob and you wanted to feel cooler than everyone else." Ah, but the astute reader will have realized something's the matter. A few months back, when I got mine, the 60GB iPod was the top of the line. I always go as top-shelf as I can. As yet, I only got the 30GB model. What up with that? Oh, well, I got it for free, so ha ha if you've been lusting after one.

Alright, so I've bitched publicly about it, and I've made fun of all the Pod-less plebians who are going without. Now the goddamn thing is gonna break down on me for sure. Because even with as much as it pisses me off, shit, I'll take it. I wouldn't pay no $300 for it because it isn't worth $300, but at $0 the price is right. And if I did have to say one good thing about it, it's the fact that even at the 30GB level, that's still a lot of fucking space. I just rip entire CDs and throw them on there, not caring about how much space I'm wasting because I have a fuckton of it. The drive capacity alone almost makes up for all it's annoyances, and certainly makes it worth the $0 price tag.