Winter Cleaning

I don't know where you work (probably even if you're related to me), but days are a bit less hectic around AquentLand come the end of December. Which means it's usually the time a lot of us clean up everything in, on, and near our desks. Books we haven't touched since 2002, business cards lost at the bottom of desk drawers, hard drives...

Sigh, hard drives.

We just had Niyati from our HQ IT department come out to tune up our machines, which involved a lot of head shaking and tsk tsking. (Okay, I'm joking. she was very courteous and we really deserved to be beaten about the neck and face with Ethernet cables, considering the state of some of our computers.)

I got the worrisome message that my hard drive was nearly full. Yes, nearly full. You might already be guessing the culprit (and no, it isn't pictures): iTunes music files. Try 16 gigabytes of it.

There's something so nice about putting music onto your laptop so you can listen to it while you're working. And something not so nice about programs crashing because you have no more room left on your hard drive.

I've managed to move all those files off the computer (and clean up a bunch of e-mails living on my hard drive since '99), so I'm escaping the wrath of IT for the present moment.

But the fact remains, where the heck am I going to stick my music files?

Buying music and songs on iTunes is ever so convenient (especially since you can do it while listening to a track on KCRW's A List or New Ground), but if you can't stick them on your computer permanentl, and you can't copy them to disk from an iPod, what's a technologically-challenged fella or gal to do?

Drea helped me clean out my library and suggested buying the 80GB iPod,but looking at my post-holiday budget, I'm about $340 short. I have just enough to buy the 60GB Vente Latte from Starbucks, though.

I'm asking you, dear reader, if you have any suggestions. Anything to keep all your music in order without endlessly cleaning, moving, and endlessly connecting cables all around your desk?

I'm not desperate, I'm just cleaning.