Creative

I recently bought a portable digital audio jukebox (err... like an iPod but a Creative Nomad Zen Xtra instead) and I'm quite happy with it. It wasn't the cheapest thing around but it's a good size at 30GB. I wanted the 40GB or 60GB but since neither of those were big enough to hold my music collection as it currently stands I didn't see it as worth the extra money. As it stands I'm going to have to get a new hard-drive to fit everything.

At any rate it has thus far it has worked out just like I planned; I have been working more overtime because I have had something to listen to. My portable CD player recently broke and instead of spending another $70 on a new one I got this - which is much easier to carry back and forth than a pile of CDs.

I don't have a CD changer in my car because I don't listen to music like that; I couldn't pick six (or 10) CDs for the week and leave it at that. As it stands rarely a day goes by without me bringing a couple CDs to the car or back in from the car - and my commute it only 15 minutes each way.

Thus my stack of CDs at worked changed daily - if not more frequently. One thing I will miss is not being able to listen to newly released CDs bought while on lunch on Tuesdays.

UPDATE: Well, I guess I cut the part about how I listen to music: generally by albums, almost never at random. There are times, however, when I am feeling overwhelmed by any number of things (including amount of music I want to listen to right now) when I do go to a random. For this I created a playlist with the cream of the crop... except that I can't seem to make myself leave fantastic songs off of it. This play list (The Cream) currently has 562 tracks, which is 15% of the 3693 total tracks... though the 15% figure is misleading as there are all sorts of fantastically amazing tracks that I have left off (examples: Right Off by Miles Davis, Mogwai Fear Satan by Mogwai and the Adagio from Bruckner's 8th symphony.)

At any rate my point was I worked two hours extra today because I was able to listen to J Church's the Drama of Alienation, Bikini Kill's The Singles and the Kills' No Wow (yeah, now I have to wait until the day after to hear a new CD at work, not a real issue.)

I do, however, have a question: How am I supposed to refer to this thing in, say, casual conversation? "Creative Nomad Zen Xtra" is a mouthful and meaningless to most people; lopping off any set of those words shortens the name but leaves nothing that is actually any better. "Portable digital audio jukebox" is ridiculous and the acronym isn't any better. I almost want to call it an "iPod" - the pros being recognizability and subtle erosion of Apple's brand name; the main con being that it reinforces the idea that iPods are the only option out there. "MP3 player" has much the same pros and con of "iPod" but it makes me think of a ridiculously small (in capacity, mainly) item which is therefore insignficant to one's basic listening life (i.e. something one'd just use while at the gym or some such.)

Ideas?