NIKKEI VIEW: The Asian American Blog

Happy 5th birthday to the iPod.
I was kind of slow to get on the bandwagon, mostly because it was (and still is, although not as much) so damned expensive to join the iPod club.
But like a lot of people, once I got the thing, I was hooked. It’s a cliche to say it but I’ll [...]

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CNN this week ran this Associated Press story, about how musicians who’ve been holdouts from the iPod/iTunes bandwagon — the Beatles, Led Zep, Garth Brooks and others among them — will probably cave in and finally allow their music to be downloaded song-by-song.
Apple’s iPod dominates the digital music player market, and iTunes accounts for over [...]

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Here’s the best description I’ve read yet about the “Jack FM” format — a hodgepodge of album oriented and hit songs from the past two, maybe three decades played up in no particular order. The stations that feature the format (Denver’s Jack 105.5 FM was the first station in the U.S. to adopt the format, [...]

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I love how smart Apple is with its line of iPods, and more important, the content it makes available for iPods. I got a video iPod for Christmas (good thing, since my 40GB 4th generation iPod is filled up with over 11,000 songs), and in addition to putting all my classical music and odds and [...]

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A long time ago, in a galaxy far away, I wrote a rhapsodic review of Madonna.
I thought back then that she was a perfect encapsulation of American consumerism, and though that’s kind of an icky concept, I thought she was special because her music was so good. She captures (or at least back then, captured) [...]

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I’ve been a fan of Apple’s TV commercials for the iPod since long before I got my own iPod.
The instantly recognizable campaign, with the silhouetted figures dancing with their iPods in hand and the “iconic” white earbuds and wire flopping around are just plain cool. A couple of weeks ago, Apple launched its latest TV [...]

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When Barbie was “born” into the Mattel family of toys in 1959, she wasn’t just a doll. She was the epicenter of a retail revolution.
When parents bought their baby-boomer girls a Barbie, they were agreeing to an unspoken but implicit contract with the toy store to return time and again and buy stuff – lots [...]

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Every day’s bus ride from the Westminster Park and Ride is like listening to the weirdest radio station imaginable — a lot weirder than even the heyday of “underground” radio of the late ’60s and early ’70s.
And every ride, I hear gems out of the 10,064 tracks on my 40GB 4G iPod that make [...]

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