My Son's MP3 Players: Then and Now


It is time to finish up Christmas shopping for the year, and like a good little geek I was doing it online. My parents sent us a check to purchase gifts for our children, and my high school age son decided his two year old iPod needed to be replaced. Actually it has lost its left channel on the headphone jack so it was time to spend my parents' money and buy their oldest grandson a new iPod media player. He wanted the 4th generation 32GB black iPod Touch so I had to do some quick surfing to see where to order it. I know the local Galleria Apple Store, the Brentwood Micro Center, Best Buy and Target are all selling them for $299.99, but we would also have to pay Missouri and city sales tax (both Brentwood and Richmond Heights have the same steep total sales tax of 8.425%.) The total with tax would be $325.27 plus the fun of visiting a local retailer during this holiday season. So I looked online and, sure enough, Amazon.com was selling them for $269.99 with free shipping and no sales tax, a savings of over $55. Plus I get to sit here at home and let the delivery people bring it to my front door. To calculate your own savings you can use my shopping local versus online calculator that I wrote last year.

That means I can probably soon be using my son's older iPod Touch (with one working audio channel) since I always inherit his old technology. Not only am I using his old cell phone, and his old digital camera, but I have both of his older MP3 players, a 1GB Creative Zen V and a 256MB Creative Muvo N200. That N200 still works fine after six years, even after he dropped it in the toilet when he was in elementary school.  It is hard to believe a 256MB MP3 player cost $60 back in 2005, but I found the NewEgg receipt in my GMail and that is what we paid for it. Frankly it plays music just as well as my son's new $300 iPod Touch will, and it is more portable too! And replacing the battery on it is so simple, since I just open it up and slide in a charged up a NiMH rechargeable AAA. I was just using it today to listen to some tunes while riding home on the MetroLink. For a 10 minute ride from the Wash U Danforth campus to the Richmond Heights station parking lot, I really do not need 32GB of music, and 256MB is plenty big, even if the new iPod will have 128 times more space.
High tech media player, circa 2005

Comments

F1aco said…
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
11:31 AM
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

BMI & BMR Calculator (Body Mass Index and Basal Metabolic Rate)

Image
My wife has been researching type 2 diabetes and recently checked a book out of the library which included a body mass index (BMI) chart much like the one pictured here. Whereas it is fairly easy to follow, I, of course, think it must be converted to an online calculator! However, when I checked the Internet, there were already a billion of them so I had to make one that was different. So my lovely BMI BMR calculator accepts either inches or centimeters for your height and pounds or kilograms for your weight and calculates not only your BMI, but also your BMR (basal metabolic rate) which determines how many calories you should consume! So I made a spiffy "all in one" healthy body indicator calculator which not only determines how underweight or overweight you are, but also tells you how many calories you should consume to maintain or improve your ideal weight. 
Read more

Trying out the L'Ecole Culinaire Presentation Room restaurant

Image
We had been seeing the ads for the restaurant at L'Ecole Culinaire and since we live so close by we thought we would try it out. We had always enjoyed dining out at cooking or hotel schools like the CHIC in Chicago and the Statler at Cornell where we went to college. Since we still love to go out and eat here in St. Louis , we ventured over to their restaurant on the first day they were open for lunch. The first thing we noticed is that they do not have much parking! They really need to let patrons know where they are supposed to park. The restaurant itself is small but very well attended. There was one fellow who kept straightening all the centerpieces and place settings on the tables, and we always saw one or two student workers milling about. The lunch menu was small and the choices did not appear overly "gourmet". The special of the day was a bison burger stuffed with cheese, and other choices picked by my group included a club sandwich, a "margherita" pi
Read more

Not all Frosted Window Films are the same!

Image
We live in an older home with a lot of issues and one of them concerns our back door to our patio from our sunroom. The door has double paned glass on it, but unfortunately the seal has broken so you can see moisture collect inside of it. We decided the easiest way to "remedy" the problem was to cover the window with some "frosted" film so we did not have to see the moisture condensing between the panes. But the question was, what film? There are a bunch of them available so we had to select something to try on the door. The first place we tried was our nearby Lowe's store which had a bunch of Gila brand film. We selected what seemed like the typical adhesive based door sized  film that cost about $25 after tax. We thought it could not be that hard to put up and look nice on our door. So one day my wife ran out and purchased it at Lowe's and we commenced to install it on our door window. We made our own soapy water solution and followed the directions
Read more