iDena

Happy birthday to my wife, Dena! She’s 29 and lookin’ fine 😉

For her birthday gift, I bought her a 4GB iPod Mini; the silver one. It was a little hard to track down a Mini, since they’ve been replaced by the scratcherific Nano‘s, but I managed to. I know she’s gonna love it when she works out and exercises. Just wait ’till she takes a trip to Carbon Computing‘s store in downtown Kitchener and wants to accessorize 🙂

However, I can just hear everyone out there that is familiar with my blog and knows about my dislike of iTunes (Exhibit A, Exhibit B and Exhibit C) laughing at me and shouting “ha ha, sucker…now you have no choice but to install iTunes!!!”. Geez, I know when I’m beat. But I still have a choice and I’m not beat yet, folks!!! 🙂

The only way I’d ever consider abandoning Winamp as my media player of choice is either if AOL somehow manage to wreck it or if a disgruntled and suddenly-crazed Justin Frankel sneaks his way back into AOL headquarters (digitally or physically) reclaims the Winamp wonder that he birthed so long ago and aboloshes it from this world. And thanks to the ml_ipod plug-in for Winamp, music can be transfered to and from her iPod Mini without having to install the resource monster that is iTunes. ml_ipod is mint!

To be fair, I did try installing iTunes 6 in the hopes that Apple had tightened things up. They haven’t. Initially, iTunes 6 used 83MB of RAM when idle. I removed those Smart Playlists and simply listened to an album (Sonic Youth‘s Sister, if you’re curious). The result was 52MB being used. Dare to compare. I listened to the same album in Winamp 5.1; it only occupied 28MB. 24MB might not seem like a big difference, especially since I have 1GB of RAM. But I listen to music while I work and working can involve running beast apps like Visual Studio or Firefox with 10-20 open tabs. Call me stingy, but I like to have physical RAM ready for me to use at a moment’s notice…paging is for chumps 🙂

Hooray for choice and efficient programming! 🙂 And hooray for my wife, who’ll be lookin’ all geek chic! 🙂