A Farewell to an iPod…and a Hello to an iPod

In April of 2006, I entered a Dance Dance Revolution tournament at my college, the one and only time since I graduated in December 2005 that I’ve gone back. Yes, if you know how your college commencement schedules work, that means I didn’t attend my own graduation ceremony. To make a long story short, I won, and my reward for this was a 2GB iPod Nano, seen below. In 2006, this was a pretty big deal.

My Trusty 2GB iPod. Awesome 80s Metal Added by Me (The display reads "Love Chaser/Europe/The Final Countdown").

Luckily, the Capital One Rewards Program had the solution for me. My credit card usage is frequent enough (IE I use it for basically everything, although I make sure to pay off a substantial portion of it, if not the entire outstanding debt, every month) that, combined with their Summer Rewards catalog, I was eligible to receive a free 16GB iPod Nano. Despite my current Nano’s lack of capacity, I have to say, I’d have it for 4 and a half years or so, and the fact that I won it at a college DDR tournament makes it one of the few connections I have left to my “pre-real world” life, as it were–despite the fact that I had gotten a nasty dose of the “real world” in the second half of 2004. So it’s a bit strange to actually be discarding the 2GB iPod given that aspect.

Still, though, it’s been good for me in a way too. In preparation for being able to hold 8 times the music on the thing, I re-listened to a couple of albums that I hadn’t heard in many years–Stabbing Westward’s Wither, Blister, Burn and Peel and Rush’s Tech for Echo. I plan to do this to a lot of other albums I have but haven’t listened to as well, which should be pretty neat. Hopefully, the new iPod will get here in the next couple days, and I’ll be able to start loading it up with music and the like soon after that.