When Mr. Karen got me a new iPod (well, new to us—it was a refurbished unit because the color I wanted wasn’t available in the generation that was current at the time), I passed along my old one to him. He doesn’t use it very often, just on long driving trips, so I put new content on it for him maybe three times a year. I was doing this in the most tedious way possible, writing notes on paper about which episodes of which podcasts he’d listened to on the old nano versus where I was on the new nano, setting the played/unplayed flags in iTunes, synching his iPod, then re-setting the flags and synching mine. I’m sure that sometimes one or both of us missing hearing some episodes of some podcasts due to the manual nature of the process. Today I finally did what I should have done from the start—researched and found a better way to use multiple iPods with one computer (or I suppose I could have used two different computers, but that would mean installing iTunes where it was only used a handful of times a year and that seems wrong). One new iTunes library later, each nano is loaded from its own list. I should have done this ages ago. Of course, it could be that the next time I get a new computer and have to move my library, I’ll be complaining that it’s twice as hard to do with two. But since I just recently got a new machine, that pain, if it happens, is a couple years off, and it could be there’ll be some entirely new way of getting content onto personal listening devices by then.

On this date in 2011: What’s Inside
2010: Reddit
2009: A Tale of Two Cameras
2008: A Simple Request
2007: Messy Is as Messy Does & Festive
2006: Restaurant Critic Time
2005: Welcome to Where?
2004: Cheater’s Compass
2003: Soon the Sun Will Be Up
2002: One Girl, All Alone