A few things iPod

1. My (now old and terribly boring) 60G colour iPod has recently started ordering lists differently. Specifically, while numbers previously preceded letters, it now does the reverse. I swear, for example, that "1977" by Ash used to be towards the top of my Albums list, whereas it's now right down the bottom. I assume this is the result of the last iTunes update.
   
2. Last week, I once again trod on my second set of replacement headphones. (Dropping them on the floor at night seems so convenient at the time.) Although I am somewhat of an expert at repair-by-superglue, they were hosed—I finally squashed something internal and it no longer reproduced sound. The semi-interesting part is this: standard iPod headphones seem ridiculously hard to find in Adelaide. It took visits to three stores. I didn't want headphones on a lanyard. I had already bought headphones with the remote control plug-in last time I broke my headphones. I would have thought plain old iPod headphones were one of the more popular items. And, for the record, they cost $A 48. Ouch.
3. I tried out the iTunes Store's "Complete My Album" feature. I had purchased a single ("Smokers Outside the Hospital Doors" by Editors), and later decided I wanted the album ("An End Has a Start"), so I upgraded from the single. Initially I thought it was curious that the single didn't join the album—I expected to now have just one entry under Editors for albums, but in fact I have two. One is the LP without the single, and the other is the single. I could manually merge the single into the album using iTunes, I suppose, but I've decided I like it the way it is. After all, I really did buy that single. I just didn't want to pay for it again when I bought the album, so it gets excluded. I think that's the right way to do it. And, as others have noted, it's also about time it was possible to purchase music this way.