I am now the proud owner of a video iPod. News junkie and uber-geek that
I am, the first videos I watched on it were newscasts.

And then I didn’t. Stupid me, I had totally forgotten that my iPod is
Mac formatted and that the computer at my current gig is a PC.

When I recently replaced my first generation iPod, I just had to get the
video model because I wanted to watch that day’s ABC World News podcast
and the Fox News Flashes on my commuter rail journey home. Fourty-five
minutes of just my iPod and my noise canceling headphones, completely
oblivious to the jerks talking too loud on their cellphones. (I have a
special playlist of songs with lots of high frequency sounds that I turn
up to earsplitting volume when I sit next to the worst walkie-talkie
mode offenders. I’m beginning to loose my hearing anyway, so I get great
pleasure in counter-annoying.)

So there I was on my first workday with my new gadget, and I plug it in
to my desktop and iTunes politely asks if I want to re-format it. No,
duh! So I walk it around the corner to the Art Director’s office (who
had already left) and logged in to my account on her Mac. Downloaded the
World News Webcast, plugged-in my iPod, and “This file type cannot be
played on this device.” Now, although that was just a file type format
blunder, that only happens occisionally (and whose fault – ABC or
Apple), needless to say I have still not watched a same-day video
podcast yet. After all, I’m already late for the train. Who has time to
download podcasts in someone else’s office? If Macs can read and make PC
formatted CD-ROMs, why can’t iTunes read and write to Mac and PC
formatted iPods?