Tuesday, April 24, 2007

Eyepud

When travelling in an RV it is opportune to think about what to carry and take along.

When living in a house, having buying power and Home Depot and Wal-Mart around the corner, anything considered needed can be instantly purchased.
To be used maybe infrequently but there is always the garage to keep it in.
And when the garage starts to fill up, we organise a garage sale next Saturday.

Most people are not aware what exactly they have.
How many different objects they have collected around themselves in the house.
This is a strange phenomenon: to have for no good reasons.
To own while it has no purpose.
And we should wonder what this does to a person.
To constantly purchase objects which are not really needed and to own them.

One of the consequences of materialism, because this what it is called, is that it makes the person figuratively speaking more heavy.
Unable to liberate from ties to take off into spirituality.

This is an old wisdom.
For centuries it has been understood that “to materially have” stops from “to spiritually receive”.
Therefore, monks for example, were promising to live without material possessions to be able to concentrate on praying and meditating.
To be there for God completely without having Wal-Mart interfering.

In this particular case, over the last 10 years this process of de-materialisation has been experienced.
To unattach.
All material possessions prior to living permanently in an expedition vehicle have been either sold or have been offered as gifts to family and friends.
Currently, everything in possession is in the Fuso Santek.
Except for the huge photo-archive and the collection of paintings being elsewhere.

What is in possession is known.
Every object in the Fuso Santek because all together it is not much.
Just the necessary.
This gives a wonderful feeling of being unattached.
Free of having, owning and carrying stuff in life of no importance.

At the same time, cargo space in an expedition vehicle is limited.
And every kilo (2.2 pounds) carried makes the expedition vehicle heavier consequently having more wear and tear on the truck and higher fuel consumption.
The Fuso Santek is promoting the concept of being free as much as possible of earthly goods.

In the Fuso Santek is a large box in which the collection of CD’s with music from all around the world.
Taking much space and rather heavy.



The idea was born to get rid of this volume and weight.
This was made easy because the company Apple makes a device called the iPod.
It is not much more than a hard disk but very cleverly made for easy use and it works very well together with an Apple computer.
This particular iPod, the 80 GB model, has so much storage capacity it can easily keep on its hard disk the content of hundreds of CD’s.



It only takes many hours to do this.
Because a CD must first be imported in the program iTunes after which it can be transferred to the iPod.



This normally goes smoothly.
However, when in a general database the CD is not known and the titles and names have to be filled manually, it is an ordeal.
To activate a field takes much time.
It needs the patience of a monk.

Another issue is that in the past with the software Toast Titanium’s Spin Doctor albums on music cassettes were transferred to CD’s.
These CD’s play perfectly on an Apple computer and any CD-player but it is impossible to import these CD’s in iTune.
And therefore impossible to transfer them to the iPod.
Somewhere in the process of importing, often after it is almost done, iTunes crashes and a forced stop is required with nothing imported as the final result.
There might be fervent and loyal blog readers who have knowledge about this and could recommend a method to get those CD’s on the iPod anyway.

Meanwhile Lluvia, one of the most beautiful girls in Mexico, has been informed that she and her sisters and brother will soon receive as a gift the box with hundreds of CD’s now almost all on the iPod.

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This posting was not sponsored by Apple Inc.

To learn more about iPods, iBooks and iTunes, click on:
www.apple.com

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Buy a external hard drive and back up all your music before you give the disc away. One computer crash and your lost.

Anonymous said...

Michel,
There is s group in Yahoo called APPLEIPOD. That would probably be a good source for info on transferring those special audio cd's to your ipod.

Don Howe
2002 LD MB
Long Island

Anonymous said...

Michel,
We were able to bring along our 300 CD's in our RV by removing them from their plastic boxes and storing them in special binders you can buy at places like Circuit City or Best Buy. There are several different types, but some can store 100 CD's in a single binder which is the size of a small notebook. Very light, and takes up almost no room.