Lunar Obverse

I love the internets! I’ve uncovered a billion-dollar idea, and here I am just giving it away for free.

Accessories for iPods are, it’s been said, is a billion-dollar industry.

Consider this. Last year, Apple sold 32 million iPods, or one every second. But for every $3 spent on an iPod, at least $1 is spent on an accessory, estimates Steve Baker, an analyst for the NPD Group, a research firm. That works out to three or four additional purchases per iPod.

There are cases, and stickers, and add-ons, and car kits… you name it. However, there’s one simple item that, it seems, no one has yet made.

I’ve got a beautiful iPod (30GB Video model in iconic white), and I keep it in a case. It’s been in a case since the day I took it out of the package. First I had one of those gel cases, but it didn’t have screen protection so I cobbled something up from some cell phone screen protectors. But I didn’t like that solution – it hid the iPod too much and the clear plastic over the screen made it hard to see.

Also, I have a Griffin iTrip, which lets me play my iPod over any FM radio. I don’t own a car, but I use FlexCar, so the iTrip was the perfect solution for me. It gave me a temporary connection to whichever car I was using at the time.*

But the iTrip doesn’t fit into the dock connector when it’s in the case. I have to take it out of the case to use it. Up ’til now I’ve used the old gel case, which I’ve modified to accept the iTrip – but that means the screen, the most important part to keep scratch-free, is exposed. My solution to that? Put the whole thing into a ZipLoc bag. Ugly but functional.

What I’d like is a simple connector, adapter, or cable that had a male dock connector on one end to plug into the iPod, and a female dock connector on the other that would accept the iTrip, and would allow me to use the iTrip without taking the iPod, the beautiful beautiful scratch-free iPod, out of it’s protective clear case.

I asked the geniuses at the Apple Store. They’d never heard of such a thing. I’ve looked online. Couldn’t find it. In the forums on iLounge, I found a thread that suggests that I could make one from an old dock. Yeah, I suppose I could do that. If I wanted to drop another $40 on a new dock just to tear it apart. Ugh. And if I’m going to do that, why not just buy the iTrip Auto, which already does what I want? I mean, besides the fact that that little doohicky costs seventy smackers and would be yet another cable I had to carry around, rather than a cheap little adapter…

Why doesn’t someone just, y’know, make something like this, already? I know there’s folk out there who would buy one?

* And if this doesn’t prove the point about accessories, I don’t know what will. In addition to my $300 iPod, I’ve bought not one but two cases and a radio transmitter that I infrequently use. Actually, the iTrip is my third one – I’ve had two previous models, for earlier iPods. Of course, neither of those fit my newest iPod… which can only be solved with the application of mo’ money.

It’s published!

It’s late and I need to get to bed, but the new site is published and working.

Feel free to poke around and see if anything is broken and let me know. I’ll be doing the same over the next week.

I still want to update the photo gallery to match the look of the rest of the site. I have some other, smaller things to fix, also – old links that now point to dead URLs, trying to reverse the order of the Archive list, giving the Maps an actual page, updating and re-posting my trophy page… probably other stuff, too.

But for now, this is my new beautiful home on the internets.

Series of shocks and disappointments this morning, some worse than others:

• dante, due to my mortal enemy’s failure, was unreachable all night and most of the morning, cutting me off from my site and my email.
• The cute blonde barista that gave me her email address last week gave me ample evidence this morning that she’s only doing her job and being customer-friendly – nothing more.
• I find myself monumentally unmotivated at work (not that that’s a new thing, mind you, but the guys on the team I work with were complaining more heavily and passive-aggressively than usual about the workload)
• And the scariest piece of news is that last night around 4:00, when I was leaving work, there was a shooting on the corner by my building.

What in the hucking fell am I doing here? If I could be randomly injured at any moment, why am I wasting time working somewhere I despise?

Something’s got to change.

I read a review last night for a book called “Why?” In it, the author, Charles Tilly, analyzes the reasons we give for different things and breaks them into four categories: a convention, a story, a code, or a technical account.

You can read the review linked above, or the book (which I am going to do at some point) for more complete descriptions of the four types. The main thing I took away from the review, however, is that which type of explanation we give is more dependent on our relationship with the person to whom we’re giving it – we use stories, for example, with people we are close to or want to be closer to, we use technical accounts to impress with our knowledge, and we use codes or conventions with people we are strangers to or want to distance ourselves from.

It was with all this in the back of my mind this morning as I approached my normal bus shelter, and saw this guy standing inside there, smoking. I’ve seen him before and I’ve seen him smoking before, and I’m not normally hard-core about not smoking but sometimes it irritates me, and Tri-Met has recently helpfully put up “No Smoking” signs on many of their bus stops which gives me a reason to speak up – that reason being a code, or more specifically, a code of behavior, a rule to follow or procedure.

I walked up, he looked at me briefly, I looked directly at his cigarette and then back at him, pointedly, I thought. It was very passive-aggressive of me.

Before I’d thought through what I was going to say, I burst out with “You know, there’s no smoking at the bus stops!”

He looked at me, looked at his smoking butt, and took a step outside the shelter. “There. I’m not in the shelter anymore.”

I walked up into the shelter, and pointed at the “No Smoking” sign. “All I know is, it says ‘No smoking’. I don’t know about in the shelter or not in the shelter.”

He took a few more steps away. “Sorry,” he said, sounding not sorry at all.

I stood there, inside the shelter, upset by the encounter, and then the concepts of the four different reasons flooded back into my thoughts. Was that kind of an asshole way to tell that guy not to smoke? Probably from his perspective, it was. But I didn’t like him and didn’t particularly want to like him or be his friend; I just wanted to not have to breathe his smoke.

But I pondered the different types of reasons and tried to come up with one of each other type. For a convention, which is like a lower-level simplified code, I could have pointed out that bus stops are for everyone, or asked him how he felt about non-smokers. OK, I’m not completely 100% sure of the difference between a convention and a code so I’m fuzzy on what I could have said here.

For a story… I could have told him about my mom who died of lung cancer (whoa, heavy one) or just mentioned how I’ve seen Tri-Met drivers enforcing the no-smoking zone.

For a technical account, I might have offered information on the damage smoking does or how second-hand smoke can be as dangerous, if not more dangerous, than smoking itself.

As I write them, none of the above explanations, including the actual one I used, sound good to me now. At the time I just grabbed for the one that came to mind right away. In the future I may give more thought to the type of explanation I give, though, and I think that’s a valuable skill to have.

It’s so strange seeing the picture of a friend I haven’t talked to in a year, plastered all over town.

But then, she is a famous ballerina.