// November 5th, 2009 // Internet, NaBloPoMo
In the past few years, I’ve morphed from a Microsoft-lover to a fully-fledged iTard. How did this happen? Clever marketing? Good SEO? Growing annoyance with Microsoft?
This may seem a bit strange to you, but I actually blame Last.fm.
You see, back in April 2006, I joined Last.fm, mainly because my peers at the Rathergood forum were joining it, and I didn’t want to feel left out… It’s bad enough being a loner in real life, but being a loner on a social networking website? That’s just sad.
I’ve never been a heavy listener of music, and I didn’t listen to it on my computer at all, because it was just too slow. My computer was a crappy Windows XP desktop that I had bought in early 2004, but 256MB of RAM really isn’t good enough when you have a hundred applications open at the same time. >.> But as time went by, I slowly began to love hearing music on my computer, despite its flaws.
Eventually, I thought, “Hey! If I don’t want my music to stop because my computer keeps crashing, I should get an MP3 player!” *claps self* I have awesome logic.
When I was a little kid, I owned a portable cassette player, which soon got upgraded to a portable CD player when I broke the other one (I’ve broken a lot of gadgets; explained in more detail here). My younger self only listened to Madonna and Cliff Richard on repeat, and needed a portable CD player when they stopped releasing their songs on cassette.
And so, all was well in the Rammi world, until something dreadful happened. I dropped it. As I was changing Cliff Richard’s Greatest Hits from 1994 to Madonna’s Ray of Light, the CD player slipped out of my hand, and right into a puddle. Despite my best efforts – talking to it, hitting it, coaxing it to work – it was never the same again.
I remember crying for a week.
I got a replacement eventually, but that one soon stopped working. After that, I just gave up. In hindsight, this was probably a good thing, because it gave me a much needed break from Madge and Cliff.
When I joined Last.fm, my music taste was just as bad as it was when I was younger, but thankfully did not involve me vogueing down the road. I was just starting to get into this whole “scrobbling” business, and wanted every single song I listened to to show up on the website. Last.fm’s website at the time told me that the only way you could scrobble was through your computer (duh) and an iPod!
I wasn’t too impressed by iPods originally, because they didn’t seem to be *that* special, when you compared them with other MP3 players… They didn’t look like Hello Kitty or resemble something rude, they didn’t come with pretty matching earphones, and they didn’t have as much space as some of the other brands available.
Yes, I judge gadgets on appearance first, and then glance briefly at the specs. Shh.
But all my negative thoughts about the iPod disappeared when I saw that it could SCROBBLE. And so, I grabbed my money, ran off to the shop, and became the proud owner of a second generation silver iPod Nano. It went everywhere with me, and I dutifully plugged it into my computer every night just so it could scrobble what I had listened to earlier that day.
Soon, I realised I wanted more Apple items, and more Apple stickers to stick around my house. When the first generation iPod Touch was released the next year, it quickly became my next pet – to coddle, access websites with, dress up in pretty cases, and, most importantly, jailbreak the hell out of the software. There’s only so many times you can play Solitaire with the second generation Nano.
I sense that my beloved iPod was feeling jealous around the newer model surrounding it, because a few months after I had bought the iPod Touch, it kicked the bucket whilst I was listening to Wuthering Heights by Kate Bush… “Oh let me have it, let me grab your soul away…” With lyrics like that, no wonder it croaked.
However, I still wasn’t satisfied. After my iPod Touch came the iPhone 3G, because I had gotten sick of carrying around several devices when one could easily do the same job as them all. I promptly jailbroke my iPhone, dressed it up, used it to phone people and accessed the internet on the bus. Oh, and of course, I used it to scrobble all my music every day.
Later that year, my Windows desktop computer finally died. And with it, so did my music collection. After many years of using Windows, I guess I wanted a change. Looking around at my collection of Apple items, there seemed to be only one choice for my next computer…
See? Without Last.fm, I would never have been sucked into that abyss of font smoothing, rounded corners and shiny shiny things without interchangeable batteries. While my music taste hasn’t improved much, my collection of gadgets with the Apple logo emblazoned on them has grown and grown.
And I have lots of stickers!
