Shuffle off to Buffalo

I know this is amazing, but just now this big electronic being went walking down Parkside Avenue, to Hertel and back.

That electronic thing was me, carrying my purse!

You would not believe how wired I was. I had my cell phone. My digital camera. And a GPS device that Howard was making me test. The GPS thing sits in my purse and every once in a while it vibrates and sometimes it talks. When it talks you have to just not act too embarrassed and hope it will stop. Howard has it set on low volume so it is not too bad.

In addition to all that equipment I had with me my new I-Pod Shuffle that I wrestled to the ground today with the help of an hourlong conversation with Apple tech support. That is a picture of a Shuffle up above. It doubles as a barrette! When it warms up here in Buffalo and I no longer have to wear a big woolen hat, that is how I am going to wear it.

The guy I talked to at Apple, his name was Phil and several times during our conversation I think he was trying not to cry. I kept talking about my brother George who was the one who gave me the I-Pod.

"Do you know the purchase date of your I-Pod?" Phil asked me for starters.

"I do not," I said. "My brother George gave it to me."

"You can't load podcasts on an I-Pod Shuffle," Phil tried to tell me when I wanted to know how to do that.

"Oh, but you can," I said. "My brother George has done it."

George's I-Pod Shuffle is just like mine only it is pink. He gets compliments from people all the time marveling that he is manly enough to run around with a hot pink I-Pod. Here is a picture of all the different Shuffle colors so you can see how pink the pink one is. Mine, alas, is simply silver.


One thing I am noticing is that people who have the big Apple things, like I-Phones and full-size I-Pods, get tremendously bothered when someone has simply a Shuffle. But that is how we want it. These Shuffles are great. They are so cheap that if you lose them so what and if they fall in the john so what.

If someone puts a gun to me and demands my I-Pod Shuffle, no problem, I just hand it over!

The only problem was figuring out how to put music on to the Shuffle. It lived up to its name, I will say that! The first thing it did without me telling it to do that was to grab up Leonard Pennario's performance of Rachmaninoff's "Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini," which it somehow located on my laptop, and shuffle all the variations wildly.

Then it presented the piece in this new form, interspersed with a group of monks singing various sections of the Gregorian chant Mass of the Angels. It found that on my laptop, too, and instinctively grabbed it. There was one other thing it mixed in too, and that was Miklos Rozsa's music from "Ivanhoe." For the life of me I do not know where that came from.

What a wild and woolly work of art that was when my Shuffle was through shuffling! No wonder Apple Phil was on the verge of tears.

When Phil and I had finally disciplined the Shuffle and calmed it down I had it playing me a Mozart divertimento. That is a word I love, divertimento. It means something to divert you.

I needed that today!