Here's the scenario: Santa brought me a shiny, new iPod for Christmas. Right out of the box, it started giving me problems. After I filled it with 30 gigs worth of music tediously transfered from an older model with a dying battery, it crashed and refused to reboot. I finally had to wipe the hard drive and start over again. Then it developed a nasty habit of locking up every time I connected it to iTunes.

I spent a few hours talking with Apple's technical support on Saturday. They finally threw up their hands and decided to send me a new one. The next day, a family member who fixes Apples for living spent some time with my laptop and eventually figured out the cause. So I should send the replacement back, right?

Well, there's another problem. I just discovered that the iPod has a dead pixel in the center of the screen.

So what would you do? Put up with the dead pixel? Or go through the hassle of transferring over all that music again onto the replacement iPod? I've done this now twice and each time it's taken somewhere in the neighborhood of four hours.

Yeah, I have no luck with doodads, cars or anything that operates on electricity or fossil fuels. If you don't believe it, ask me about my TV sometime or try clicking on one of those archive links on the sidebar. It may be time for me to forsake all technology created after the dawn of the 20th century. Writing blog posts about my growing collection of lemons is getting tedious.

While I'm on the subject, I've got to be honest. I'd rather have a 100 gig widescreen iPod than an 8 gig iPhone.

Sure, the interface looks impressive but what is this thing but a spruced-up Blackberry with a touchscreen?

Labels: technology_bites