I invested in what was once the biggest baddest iPOD on the market. A 30 Gigabyte white beauty. But I have used it very little in the past two years and I want to know if it is my problem or not (well the $ was my problem that's for sure).

My partial list of complaints is:

1) No radio. I like to be able to switch between current news and recordings. I can do this on my $50 walkman. Why not the iMAC?

2) Earbuds. How do you keep them things in your ears when you are running, scrambling, or just walking even. Most of the time I've used headphones from my walkman. When you see those advertized silhouettes dancing on those really good television commercials, I can only imagine their earbuds are crazy-glued in there.

3) iTUNES. I have imported my entire collection of CDs onto my desktop computer's hard drive. This is a lot of classical music, a lot of folk music, classic R&B and Rock and Roll. When I imported it I was online, so iTunes did a CD Database look up and labeled the tracks for me. I keep the music organized in my own set of files and folders by genre and artist, but in the case of Comedy albums I have a Comedy folder, and in the case of some ancient recordings I have a special sector for them, too. In order to load this into iTUNES, I have to give iTUNES the power to reorganize this, then load it into the iPOD. What I did in fact was to leave my hard disk music sacrosanct, but duplicate it onto another hard drive, and let iTUNEs organize that. iTUNES organizes by looking at the mp3 tag, then organizes by what the mp3 tag considers to be the artist and album. Trouble is, the data base that converted all my music is not set to some huge master file, but to many different settings. So one copy of Tchaikovsky's Symphony No. 6 may be listed with the Composer's name, or the Conductor's name, or the Orchestra's name. iTUNES cobbles this all up together with umpteen folders that I don't want. (I can go into more detail if this doesn't make sense).

4) Connectivity. iPOD of course was first made for Macintoshes. But they released iTUNES for PC some time ago, and that's what I've got. But I think Apple's iTUNES is very finicky when it comes to talking with the iPOD. Maybe it's better on a Mac computer. I'm not going to change computers just for my mp3 player.

5) Battery. The battery is dedicated, i.e., I can't just pop in 4 AA's when charge runs low. I find this to be a major inconvenence. I have to have a dedicated charger and i don't know how to charge this off my car battery either.

When I complain about this to my sister, who helped me choose it out, she says I'm becoming a fogy. She uses a different word for it, but it's basically the verb form of fogy. I don't want to believe her because i'm still single.

I also don't want to become so mad I end up throwing this elegant little device into the street.

Any aide or encouragement will be mostly appreciated.