I own an iPod. Darin got me a very nice 15 gig one for my birthday in 2004. Once we finally figured out how to use the iTrip play-through-the-radio attachment, it became a permanent fixture in my car.

I have an iPod Shuffle. Last year Steve* gave every Apple employee one as a thank you for a great year. Darin said, “Are you going to use that? Because if you’re not we should give it as a gift to someone.” I tried it out, and it’s become a permanent part of my exercise habit. Have tunes, will do boring cardio workout at gym.

My brother-in-law has worked on iPod for years. Darin worked on the iPod before it came out. My running bud, Rob, worked on iPod for four years, up until a few weeks ago. (And he never told me about the video iPod, the bastard.)

I know plenty about iPod. I know who’s working on iPod (though none of them will tell me what they’re working on — Darin and Mitch don’t even tell one another what they’re working on, and they’re brothers). It’s old hat to me, right?

I have an iPod Nano in my hands, and I can’t stop playing with it. It’s so small. It’s so cute. Look at the screen! It’s so thin and tiny — and yet can fit so much music, so many podcasts!

I want to go running right now, just so I can try it out.

Apple is amazing at creating plug-and-play electronic crack. So why haven’t they taken over the world? Jeez. It’s so frustrating sometimes.

§

Darin knew way ahead of time about the MacBook announcement at MacWorld. And didn’t tell me about it.

My friend Otto IM’d me: “So Darin knew and didn’t tell you? Divorce!”

Me: “No, no. A fully tricked-out MacBook, that’s what.”

Apple was nowhere near this controlled when I worked there. It seemed like everyone had the Mercury News on speed-dial. These days, Darin tells me about something, he gets fired. (I’ve decided it’s better to hold off on knowing and get the MacBook eventually, instead of collecting unemployment.) It’s better for the company, obviously. I’m just amazed they’ve managed such a veil of secrecy.

What’s hilarious is, whenever Darin and his brothers — only one of whom works on iPod — discuss the iPod, iTunes, or downloading, in the middle of whatever it is they’re saying they’ll throw in, “Don’t steal music.” I wonder if they have hypnotic programming sessions where everyone learns to say that.

* Seriously, if you’ve got to ask “Steve who?”…

I bought myself a seltzer bottle for Christmas. Isn’t it pretty?

At first, I couldn’t make it work. Then I noticed the cartridges not only said “Cream” but also said NO₂ instead of CO₂. (I had those cartridges because that’s what the chick at Williams-Sonoma sold me, okay?) I took the cartridges back, got the ones labeled “Soda,” and discovered they work much, much better.

Normally I drink carbonated water mixed with a slug or two of Torani syrups, available in nearly every flavor you can think of (and even more, if you buy the full-sugar ones — currently i use the sugar free ones flavored with Splenda). I hope adulterating perfectly good water with syrup removes it from my “glasses of water per day” total, but I can’t say that with certainty.

The best thing about making the bottle of soda is, of course, adding the CO₂ to the water. You add the cartridge to the cartridge holder, carefully screw it in… and when the seal on the cartridge is pierced, WHOOMP! The water bubbles up. Then you shake the bottle a few times (to distributed the CO₂?) and you’re good to go.

Now that I have used the seltzer bottle (successfully), I can give you a side-by-side comparison of how the bottle stacks up against a bottle of carbonated water (say, Crystal Geyser) bought at the store:

Clearly in the short run it’s much more cost-effective to keep buying the carbonated water at the store, but I much, much prefer using the seltzer bottle. It tastes better, there’s no sodium, and best of all, I’m not filling up our recyclables container every week with four or five bottles.

So if you’re like me and a)like carbonated water and b)like to make your own Italian sodas with Torani syrup, I highly recommend picking up a seltzer bottle. There are both cheaper ones and bigger ones out there, depending on your needs.

Evidently JT Leroy, child prostitute and AIDS victim, never really existed. John Scalzi thinks this is no more than convoluted ghost-writing. Susie Bright feels much, much differently about the situation:

For readers, famous author JT Leroy’s hoax — that “he” is really a “she,” that a middle-class 40-year-old woman has been impersonating the life of a lumpen gutter-whore child — must make for great reading. Memoir, shmemoir, right?

But if you’re an author, an editor, a publisher — or worse, a friend — to someone who bullshit you up one side and down the other, it’s not cute. It’s not irrelevant. It’s a cruel con, straight up, and the whole writers’ community suffered for it.

She goes on to describe her relationship with JT — apparently Bright got (and published) JT’s first work — and clearly she and a lot of other people were taken in. I feel really bad for her: I know how hard some online journalers on the ‘net took it to find out other journalers were frauds, and there was no money, time, personal contacts, and business to fuck up there.

Of course, there were the online journals set up to detail leukemia victims, or what have to you, in order to get money. And a lot of people were hurt by that too.

The most hysterical detail Bright relates is the last plea she got from JT:

Then, in October, JT wrote and asked me to help fundraise for his son’s private French immersion school, Lycee Francais La Perouse, the most prestigious and expensive grade school in San Francisco.

THUD.

I had just come from a Hurricane Katrina fundraiser before I opened my mail. JT’s plea to support his dream of higher education seemed… just plain high.

In the years since I first knew him, JT had made film and book deals galore, with celebrities fawning at every gesture. I felt like writing him and asking if he’d like to donate to my gas bill, which is suffering more of a hit than Lycee Francais’s current endowment fund.

But I didn’t write back. I didn’t want to say I felt ignored and used, because I felt silly that I had ever thought it was anything more than that.

Lycee Francais La Perouse? Hahahahaha. The lil’ street hustler sure had moved up in the world.

§

I seem to remember reading a long time ago that James Frey was a big fraud — in fact, I was surprised to see on Amazon he’d been chosen by Oprah. Perhaps the difference now is that The Smoking Gun has the proof?

Do yourself a favor and go read an excellent post from Annalisa on how today is the day — not some point in the future, but now.

Okay, it’s not an exciting speed. Hell, it’s hardly even counts as moving. But this morning Rob, Nina, and I did 4.68 miles in 52 minutes.

We’re getting faster.

Well, Rob and Nina are already faster — they sped way ahead of me for the final ten meters or so, damn their black souls to hell — but compared to the last minute-per-mile we had figured, I’ve started to speed up.

That’s one of my resolutions this year, by the way: to get back to a 10-minute-mile. One of the great things about fitness resolutions is that even before you achieve them, you already have the next level in your sights. A little faster, a little farther, a little harder. Do a trail run one year; hope to do it a whole hell of a lot better (or easier, or faster up the hill part, or whatever) the next year.