The Road to the Horizon: iPod

The school I graduated from, had one PC at the time: An Apple II. It stood in the library, and was almost inaccessible for any student. If they could, they would have put it under a glass bulb to make sure nothing happened to it.
I wrote string loads of programs in BASIC, but it remained a paper exercise as was never allowed to key it in.

After I graduated in 1983, I worked for an IT research company. We worked mainly on high tech graphic stuff. Such as digital imaging. Such as the stuff you can now do 1,000 times faster and 1,000,000 more accurate on any laptop. With freeware software. But we, we needed a 15 by 10 metres room full of PDP and VAX minicomputers. The number-crunching power of this room was roughly 1/10th of my laptop. My laptop also stores 1,000x more information.

In 1985, I bought my very first home computer, this Apple IIe:

It costed around US$5,000. Had a whopping 64 Kbyte of memory. No hard disk, but storage in two 128 kbyte mini floppies. The screen featured 40 characters per line. I sneaked in another 64 Kbyte of memory and upgraded to 80 characters per screen, but that is how far I could go.

Just last week, we bought this little thing for my youngest:

This iPod Nano has 18 Gbyte of memory, roughly 100,000x more than my Apple IIe but at 1/20th of the price. Hard disks are no longer used. The screen has a better resolution than anything we could dream of in the 80's.

And still, with all of this technology, we can not get half of the flights in the air due to 10 cm of snow. Proof of the matter: I am looking at it, here at Brussels airport.

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Let's have a look in those four bags I always travel with. What are my secret supplies? The things that make the life of an aid worker, a “globetrotter by necessity”, sustainable?

Part #2: Music – my iPod and Bose headset.

Music soothes my spirit. It lifts me up when I feel down. Pumps me up when I am low on energy. Calms me down before going to bed. Or lifts me up when taking a shower. Most of my memories in life is connected to music. To songs, to artists, to tunes. And my iPod is the core of my musical existence. Some of my favourates, I collected on this page.

All the music I have, is on this iPod (plus the full backup of the most critical data on my laptop!). It is a 60 Gbyte iPod which I bought in Dubai some years ago. It has 4,000 songs on it. From hardcore dance music to classical. From rare ambient music, to pop music. Reggae, R&B, soul, oldies and newbie’s. I dig it all. I have not many accessories for it. Just the power supply and USB cable. And a plug-on gimmick that has the iPod broadcast music on the FM band, so I can pick it up on a car stereo or a portable radio (I don’t carry speakers with me, so sometimes need a bit of volume through an FM radio), a car charger for those long road trips, and that is it. Oh, and i protect it in a small leather case which also goes over the display, to protect it from scratches.

Plus my secret weapon, a must for each serious iPod fan: My Bose headset (www.bose.com), the QuietComfort 2. It is an expensive piece of kit, but worth it. Works on batteries. If you don’t play music, and just switch it on, it kills all the ambient noise. Practical on a plane or anywhere where the surrounding noise annoys you.
It sits really comfortable with soft air pads. The Bose headset has a set of adapters fitting almost any audio plug and a switch-able high and low capacity input, so you can use it with almost any audio device. Plus last but not least, the audio is really high quality.