NP: a bunch of stuff on Rhapsody that I might get my little brother for Christmas

I can now say with absolute certainty that freeipods.com is legit, as I got my brand-spankin' new iPod on Monday. Nowhere in the documentation did I see any indication that it automatically starts to load songs from iTunes once it's plugged in, so I was a little confused when it immediately showed "do not disconnect" on the screen with no other information.

Fortunately, I had a drink last night with a friend who has TWO iPods -- one was a company Christmas gift that's causing one or the other of them to get regifted -- and she assured me this is normal. Still, it seems like it's taking a long time to transfer all the files (via USB 2.0 -- I don't have FireWire), as I plugged it in last night and it was still going this morning.

Now, though, I think it may be trying to tell me it's finished from my home office several miles away, as I got a registration confirmation e-mail a few minutes ago for the unit itself. I'm guessing that it automatically invoked some registration process once it was done loading all the music.

I'm still not entirely sold on the wonderfulness of iTunes, though. Some of that may be old habits from other media players dying hard, although some of it is monopolistic intransigence on Apple's part, like the fact that it assumes all your files are ripped in iTunes and not another program, so it doesn't feel the need to watch your music folder for new files.

Next I'll have to figure out how to selectively sync my music, as I either have more than 20GB of MP3s already, or will in short order as I finally start ripping most of my CD collection.

On another front in that effort, Netgear fixed the networking problem I was bitching about a week or so ago with a firmware update, so kudos to them.