Santa Claus came to my house today, riding in a white FedEx truck. He brought me a small package that held my new toy, a white 60GB 5th generation iPod. I ordered it on Sunday afternoon and it arrived Tuesday at about noon. I just did the standard free shipping, but it made the trip from Shanghai, China to my front door in just about 36 hours. I ordered one for my brother, too. It's a Christmas+birthday present from our parents. His is a 30GB white but I ordered it separately because he had it engraved. I managed to copy a few songs and one video onto my new iPod before I had to go back to work. I showed the video playback to a few coworkers and they were surprised at how good the video looked on the little screen. I haven't tried it on a TV yet. I'll be right back. I played back a movie I made in iMovie and it looks pretty ok. I could see some compression artifacts if I looked for them. But I did have to look for them. I would say it's very watchable. By the way, I didn't pay $20 for an Apple iPod A/V cable. I used this little trick with the standard cable from my video camera.

I don't get gadgets very often (Exhibit A: I still have no cell phone), so I'm pretty excited. I do need to find a case. I already put some tiny scratches on the metal part on the back of the device. In a very related story, is anyone interested in a slightly used Toshiba e350 Pocket PC with case and SD card? If I don't hear anything in the next week it's going up on eBay.