For many years now, I’ve used Right Guard as my deodorant, and more specifically, the Right Guard that’s got red highlights on the can. I don’t know what scent or variety it is, though I think it says something about sport on it. I just look for the black can with some red trim in the logo. It’s been increasingly difficult in recent months to find my deodorant, and I recently picked up a different variety of Right Guard. As it turns out, it smells a lot like what I think of as the smell of Raid bug spray (hey, what happened to the clunky, rusted orange can I remember from my childhood?).

The other day, as I lodged my misdirected daily complaint about my new possibly bug-resistant (though that’s sort of beside the point) odor, Mleeka suggested that I just toss the can of deodorant and find something else. (Some women apparently, by the way, spend lots of time smelling deodorants when they pick them out; I don’t do as much diligence, though perhaps I should, given my tendency to complain when I smell like the death-stench-nightmare of bugs everywhere.) But no fucking way am I going to toss a can of deodorant for which I paid between three and four dollars and out of which I can usually expect to get at least two months’ worth of (de)odorizing. It’s just wasteful.

Mleeka was greatly amused by the fact that I complained about wasting four bucks’ worth of deodorant at the same time that I had spent $400 on an iPod. We also recently spent thousands of bucks on bedroom furniture and home decor (the bedroom furniture I very mirthfully proclaimed in a conversation tonight would last, by gosh, until we broke it), and I’m thinking very seriously about putting around 500 square feet of decent wood flooring in my home, not exactly a cheap proposition. At first glance, my being frugal (some would say cheap) about my deodorant does in fact seem kind of funny.

But it’s really not all that comical. To throw away perfectly acceptable, if not altogether desireable, deodorant is simply wasteful. To put money toward very nice bedroom furniture that we’ll spend the next forty years enjoying trying to break is a good investment (the old furniture would have held up for another year or two, max). To spend three grand now putting wood floors in my living room so that my house is worth an extra five or six grand on top of normal value accrual in five years is simply a good investment in addition to being a good idea because I have pets that yak on my cheap carpet with some frequency. And the iPod, well, it’s a luxury item to be sure. But music is a part of my daily life. It helps me work. Several years ago, we spent fifty or sixty bucks on a CD player for the car that we’ve gotten good use out of, and the iPod is a great deal more user-friendly and safer to operate while driving. And the tape-deck CD player and the 250 CDs I’d need to pack to meet my iPod’s capacity aren’t exactly great for plane trips.

For things that are important to me, I demand quality. I could have gotten a bedroom suit for a half or a quarter of the price I paid for mine, but I wanted sturdy, beautiful furniture that would last me for the rest of my life. The same goes for the wood floors; if I go through with it, I’ll get decent quality wood (nothing synthetic) because I want something I’ll enjoy that will also increase the value of my home and ultimately be a good investment. The iPod too is an instrument of high quality, and I think it’ll prove more enjoyable to use than any other mp3 player would have been.

The deodorant, though, is repugnant apparently only to me. I’m the only person among those I’ve had sniff my freshly (de)odorized armpits who thinks it smells like Raid, and as something important but fairly (if you apply it correctly) unobtrusive, it’s something I can compromise on. I wouldn’t intentionally buy the same deodorant again, but it’s not something whose quality (so long as it masks my body odor) I value enough to waste money on buying a replacement for. It doesn’t burn when I apply it, and in fact, after it’s gotten a little stale, it smells a bit like some sort of cheap cologne (I would only buy cheap cologne, as scent isn’t a valuable commodity to me), so in a way, this deodorant provides a bonus I could never have expected.

Who in his right mind would waste such a find, even though he wouldn’t find it again if he had his way?

So I finally broke down and bought an iPod. I’ve been thinking about getting some sort of mp3 player for some time, but I never felt like the expense was justified. I’ve been exposed to a fair amount of iPod hype lately through my work, and having to rely on our CD collection in the car has long been a problem (e.g. when we forget to take the CDs, or one of them is still in the CD player in the house). I’ve also been flying out to California a lot for my work, and it’d be nice sometimes to have music. I recently bought Wagner’s The Ring, for example, and though I understand about as much German as I read in an old Gary Larsen The Far Side cartoon in which a duck asks another duck in several frames if it speaks several languages (”Sprechen sie deutsche?” “Parlez vous français?”) if I remember correctly, I’d sort of like to listen to the opera in the foreground rather than as a background as I’m writing code. A plane ride would be perfect for that (and on the plane ride I take on Monday, I’ll also be rereading the book — Gaddis’s J R — that prompted my recent interest in The Ring anyway). So I finally broke down and bought an iPod.

And it rocks.

It’s got a little finger dial thing, and the cardinal points on it are buttons that allow you to do things like play/pause, fast-forward/rewind, back up through the menu system, power the iPod down, etc. To select songs and navigate through menu options and change the volume, you whirl your finger around the dial-pad to produce a visual scrolling onscreen. You click the middle button to select, and you select the north button to back up in the menu tree. And that’s it. It’s very easy to use one-handed (while driving, for example), which is much better for navigating the 5,000 songs my model will hold than rifling through the 250 or so CDs it would take to hold the same amount of music. You can plug any standard headphones into it, and if you have a tape-deck adapter for your car (I already had one), that’ll work too. If you unplug your headphones or other adapter mid-song, the iPod’s smart enough to pause the song for you. There’s also a slider button on the top that you can toggle to deactivate all other controls, sort of the way you can lock your cell phone to keep the pencil in your pocket from dialing random phone numbers. And you can get a full charge, which is good for 15 or so hours of music, in five hours. It’s a very cool device.

One thing I noticed about it, though, which I’ve found to be true for me of Apple products in general, is that it’s very usable, but it’s not intuitive. That is, once you know how to use the thing, it’s very easy to use. But it’s not necessarily an intuitive device to use without a quick tutorial. I had to google how to change the volume, for example. I would have expected a setting you could navigate to through the menu system, but what actually happens is that while a song is playing, as long as you’re not lost in the menus somewhere (ie, you’re on the play screen, which the iPod reverts to after a few seconds of idle time in the menus if you jump out of play mode), you just whirl your finger around the wheel to adjust the volume. Now that I know how to do this, it’s very useful and very easy. It makes perfect sense. But it’s not necessarily intuitive because we’ve grown up in sort of a Windows world, where many settings require you to navigate out of your workspace to change them.

Which is not to say that the Windows paradigm is right or good. But for all the cool-factor that tends to be associated with Mac products, using them is sometimes like being forced to use metric in an English system world.

Another great case in point is Quicksilver. It’s a launcher application for the Mac. I’m sure it does much more than that (the shelf, for example, about which maybe more some other time), but I believe its basic function is that of a launcher. It’s sort of a way of using shortcut keys to get to applications and files. So you have QS running in the background. You type period-space (or something like that) to bring it to the foreground. This displays a nice rounded bubbly layer above everything else on your desktop that scared me off the first time I used it. Or it’s not so much that it scared me off as I simply didn’t know what to do with it. Was I to drag something onto it or to double-click somewhere or what? It turns out, I learned just recently, that you can type other special key sequences (holding down certain keys for a few seconds, for example) to provoke other actions. Or you can begin typing the names of applications on your Mac (”fir” is likely to make Firefox appear in the bubbly layer’s left panel, and “itu” is likely to make iTunes appear there, for example) and then tab over into the second panel to perform certain actions, such as selecting a site from your browser history to visit or a tune to play.

These shortcuts are all very nifty things once you know what you’re doing, but they’re not exactly intuitive to figure out. So I wouldn’t say that the software (which is admittedly not put out by Apple, but which is, I gather, in line with the whole Apple culture) is especially elegant or user friendly. It’s not something grandma’s ever going to use, and to me, elegant, user-friendly software is something that grandma and bleeding-edge-grandson can both use efficiently and with very little in the way of explanation.

So I think that Apple’s user-friendliness is a lot of hype (for another example, to install software, you download a disk image and double-click it to produce a window/icon that you can double-click to run the software in memory as a disk image from the desktop [wtf?] or that, to install properly, you have to drag into your Applications folder [wtf?] — wouldn’t the intuitive thing be for the software just to install and launch automatically, or at least for it to install and prompt for a folder to install into and then to launch?). That said, once you figure out the iPod, and it’s really not terribly difficult to figure out, it’s a really cool little device. I got the iPod Photo, which I won’t use for photos but which was the model available for the price I was willing to pay. It’s the 20GB device, and there’s a bigger one for $100 more, but I figured 5,000 songs was probably enough for my immediate needs. If you’ve got a little extra cash lying around and you like music and are on the move, I definitely recommend the iPod.