No Cameras Allowed by Computer Clan #009 - How My First iPod Led to a Video Production Career

Show Notes: Check out episode #002 to learn more about my first iMac and video editing experiences. Krazy Ken Episode: Visiting Apple Park Visitor Center Patreon.com/KrazyKen

Transcription*:

Hey guys how are you all doing? If you're new here, welcome. My name is Krazy Ken, and we're back with another episode of No Cameras Allowed in the autobiographical / history podcast all about the Computer Clan YouTube channel. And man, we're really going to be time traveling to the past today. So on Twitter, I put out a poll for four potential episode topics and you know, the iPod one. So we're going to be talking about that, but here's the thing. It wasn't just me buying an iPod, although that was a fun experience, especially for a middle schooler, but little did I know that iPod purchase actually led me to my video production career. It's what I do with most of my life now. And it's so much fun. So here is that story. Oh, and also I received two awesome questions for the question of the day segment that I will talk about near the end. So they're kind of related in a way they're Apple related. So these were very good. So here's the story. In elementary school, I had a CD player, you know, one of those portable circular ones. And I actually had, I think I got one when I was five and it was the coolest thing. This was a long time ago, MP3 players. Weren't really a thing. And you know, every couple of years I'd get a new one. I liked putting my CDs in there and listening to music in the car and on the bus going to school. And it was pretty fun. But then my buddy, he showed me an MP3 player and you have to remember, this was back when I wasn't a techie, you know, the iPhone didn't exist. I didn't have a YouTube channel. I didn't even have a cell phone. Right. So I didn't really know a ton about technology. So I see this MP3 player and he lets me listen to it. And and I'm scrolling through the songs and I'm like, how the heck do you have so many songs on this tiny little thing? Cause I have this giant CD player, which is like five times the size and it can hold like 20 songs. And he has this tiny little thing that probably has hundreds of songs on there. And I don't even know how he got them on there. He explained that he, you plug it into a computer and you download the songs to it. And that was a concept that was totally foreign to me at the time. So I was intrigued. I was so intrigued by his MP3 player and the audio quality was great. It was so compact and it was awesome. So around this time my mother got a third gen iPod. So this was the iPod that had, it had like the touch buttons on top of not built into the wheel. So you have the click wheel to scroll through things and then you have the play rewind menu buttons above the click wheel. They weren't unified together like they were in future versions. And this was also the first iPod to have the 30 pin dock connector. Everything was FireWire before it. So this was pretty cool. And she let me borrow it. We used iTunes on this gateway, PC running Windows XP, and we would sync music to it. And it was so cool that I could listen to all these songs on this little iPod and the click wheel that was so intriguing. You could just scroll through things so quickly with this wheel. Instead of having to click, click, click, click, click, it was just scroll and it would make this little clicking sound and it was so cool to be able to scroll through things at lightening speed. And the screen lit up and the little buttons glowed orange. It was such a cool experience. And I loved this iPod. It was so cool, but it wasn't mine. It was my mother's right. But I was intrigued by it depending on what other episodes of the podcast and other episodes on my YouTube channel you've watched, you may or may not know that I used to use a Mac when I was a wee lad. You know, I would play CD rom games on it a lot, but then, you know, that was our family computer. And then we switched to a windows PC. So when we switched to the windows PC, I kind of forgot that Apple even existed. But you know, occasionally I'd hear kids at school talk about iPods or whatever, cause that was like the hot gadget iPods were growing into selling like crazy, but I didn't have one. So I didn't really know much about Apple, but when I started playing with my mom's iPod, I started getting back into it. So some more time goes on and I still use my CD player just being grateful for what I have, but it started becoming a little annoying because you couldn't carry many songs with you, but the worst part, the absolute worst part that I hated, and this was absolutely true on bus rides and car rides was the skipping. The CD players would skip all the frigging time. And especially if you walked or like exercise, you know, you ran, I didn't really do that with a CD player, but like the skip protection was so bad on all of these CD players, you would be playing your music and then it would skip, skip, skip. And it was so obnoxious and don't quote me on this. I didn't fully research it, but I'm pretty sure that was one of the things Steve jobs really hated about CD players as well was the skipping. Cause I know when he talked about the original iPod, when he introduced it, he talked about one of the big features of the iPod being the skip protection. So yeah, I, the skipping was like the last straw and I was finally like, Hey mommy, daddy, can I get an iPod? We made an agreement and eventually we set this date. It was going to be kind of a fun trip to the mall, to the Apple store in the mall to finally get an iPod. But I had to decide which one I wanted because Apple had a couple. So I went to the Apple website and I was looking at iPods. And the one that caught my attention was the newer fifth generation iPod. There's two fifth generation iPods, which I forgot about until I did some research for this episode, there was the iPod fifth generation and then the iPod fifth generation late 2006 update. That is the model. That was the one I was looking at. And what captivated me was it had video support. So not only could I play music on the go, I could have my movies, my TV shows and everything with me. And I wouldn't have to lug around a DVD player and a bunch of disks. I could put it all on this iPod. And that was so cool to me, but I was also captivated by the iPod nano because it was small compact and it had all these cool colors, but unfortunately it didn't have video support at the time. The third generation iPod nano, which came out later had video support. But at the time the current one did not. So that was kind of the deal breaker for me. I wanted the video support. So I went with this fifth generation one in my mind, I knew what I wanted and my research was done. So then the day finally came. I remember, I don't know exactly why we did it this way, but I remember being in middle school. Right. And my parents said they would take me out of class early to go to the mall because it was kind of a drive, not too long, almost an hour ish. Maybe we would go to the mall and get an iPad. So I'm in school for the day. Just constantly thinking about getting this iPod. That was probably all that was on my mind at the time. So then it was later in the afternoon I got out of class early. That was so cool. At least, you know, I think that's how it happened. It was a long time ago and we went to this Apple store in the mall to get an iPod. I was so excited. So we get there and we go in the store and for a moment I didn't even care about the iPod anymore. Cause I saw something really freaking cool that captivated my attention, I turned to the right and I saw this ginormous 30 inch thin cinema display ever seen a computer monitor so big in my life. And the picture was so clear. This was a high resolution, large 30 inch display was so freaking big. And I right up to that, that's what got my attention. I saw this icon in the doc for the finder, you know, it's the blue smiling face, the blue Mac logo. And my brain started kind of traveling back to my childhood because when I would boot up my Mac, when I was a kid, the blue max smiley face would always pop up. And that's a memory I have from when I was a kid, but I didn't have that Mac for years. So I haven't seen that face in years, but then I see it at the Apple store here. And it's kind of like, it just triggers something in your brain. Like I got this flashback like, wait a minute. I used to use these computers. So that felt kind of surreal in a way. I was really intrigued by these really beautiful looking computers, but I kind of had to push the pause button on that because I wasn't there to buy a Mac, let alone a pro man that display was probably like three grand at the time. I don't know. I wasn't there to buy that. I was there to buy an iPod. So we selected an iPod. We probably talk to one of the Apple store geniuses to get it purchased and all that stuff. And it ended up being a fifth generation, late 2006 iPod video. Sometimes we just nickname it. The iPad video. It was the black version with 30 gigabytes. And I remember bringing it home. I plugged it into my gateway PC with windows XP. And I believe the first music sync to it was a Boston album. I love Boston. And I was just so excited to be able to listen to all my music in such a compact device, watch videos too, and have no skipping. It never skipped, it had other problems, but we'll talk about that later. So I was so excited to be able to use it and watch the videos on the go. I remember sharing it with friends. We would watch videos in the car and stuff, even though it was a tiny, 2.5 inch screen, it was still so cool because the resolution was high enough where it didn't look like crap and it was full color. It was awesome. I remember suite life of Zack and Cody. I was watching that Drake and Josh monk. I loved watching those shows. I watched those like crazy on there and by full color, I mean, take that with a grain of salt. I don't know exactly what the resolution of the color was. Cause I know the fifth generation had a sixth bit screen. I don't know if the 2006 version got bumped up, but the color was still really good. So no problems here. So of course I'm going to bring the iPod to school, right? I want it with me too much everywhere. And it it's kind of a hot gadget. It's the talk of the town at school. But the thing is, even though quite a few kids had iPods, I don't remember seeing any other kid at having an iPod video. And you have to remember, this was a $250 device. You know, other iPods were like 150 bucks or less. This was one of the more expensive models. So I don't remember seeing any other kid with this at school. I was probably one of a few. So it got a lot of attention. People were asking me questions about it when they asked me, well, like what gigs did you get? And I would reply. They were surprised because you have to remember the iPods at the time were like maybe two, four, eight gigabytes at most. And this one had 30 gigabytes. Like that was a shock. People were blown away by that's the other question I received a lot, like almost from every single kid I talked to was, do you have any wrap on there? Like I don't know what it was with everybody asking about rap. Everybody was asking me if I have rap music on my iPod and nothing against rap, nothing against it at all. It's just not my thing. I don't have any on there. I mean, nowadays I probably actually have a little bit and I have Apple music now. So I guess I have every song in Apple's database, but back then, no, I did not have any rap on the iPad. So the other thing I'd like to doing was playing games on it because Apple had iPod click wheel games where you could use the circular click wheel to play games. And my favorite one was vortex. I think of like a breakout game, but it's in a circle and I'll put a picture of it in the show notes there. And again, show notes. I have links in there and a full automated transcription of the episodes and sometimes pictures. So check the links in the descriptions for the show notes. So vortex was so much fun to play. The music was awesome. The gameplay was awesome. The graphics are so cool. That was my favorite iPod click wheel game by far. And I'm sure it was the favorite of many. It was, it was a fun game. Everything was pretty great. But like I said, there was that one issue I was having. What was that problem? Well, I don't know if this was a common issue with this model. Other people listening, feel free to let me know if you have this problem, but mine just froze up a lot for no reason it would just freeze up. And I got mad. Like I was some stupid kid being very impatient. I got mad when it Rose up and kind of ticked me off now a little bit later, I learned that you can reset the iPod by holding down the center button and the menu button for like five seconds. And then it reboots heck even at the Apple store back when the genius bars had those displays, they would show you little tips and tricks. That was one of them tips. They showed you. They showed you how to reset the iPod. So it must've been a common enough issue where they showed it on the tips and tricks screen in the store. I wish I knew that trick earlier cause I was so. I, I let the battery die. I had to wait for the battery to die before I could enjoy my iPod again. Cause I didn't know that trick. I'm glad I learned it. That was some weird issue. Anyway, the funny thing is a few months later, the iPad classic comes out with an 80 gigabyte hard drive, a new software user interface, a metal design instead of the plastic. And I was like, Oh, okay man, I just bought this new iPod and now a new model comes out. Oh, bad timing. And I was so jelly. So I wound up selling my fifth generation to my brother and I bought an 80 gigabyte black classic because I wanted it. That was just bad timing there, but it worked out great. I stuck with that iPod for you years or at least a year until the 120 gigabyte model came out. I don't remember exactly what happened. Unfortunately I don't have any of those anymore, but yeah, I did get the classic at one time, but I'm jumping forward a little too much. Let's back up a few months here before I got the classic. This is now the time where I'm getting back into the Apple brand. The iPod is like kind of quickly reintroducing me to it. And again, I was so captivated by these beautiful looking computers in the Apple store. I was like, Whoa, what the heck? So coincidentally, this was also around the time one of our family computers. We had two of them, one of our family computers was just totally dead. It was having a lot of problems with like viruses and stuff, but then the hard drive crashed. It was an IBM death star, as we'd like to say it was a desk at the hard-drive finally took a crap and we were just done with it. Like it was a, it was like a custom built like $1,600 PC. And it just had a lot of problems and we ended up just, you know, trashing it, maybe saving a few of the parts or whatever. So it was around that time. We were like, we need a new computer and we're getting back into this Apple thing. Okay, let's get one of these iMac. So we did, we bought a, the 20 inch late 2006 iMac. And it's actually the one you can see in a lot of my crazy Ken episodes on my YouTube channel in the background on the camera left side, that white iMac back there is this same iMac. It's still works. 14 years later, it's still fully functional. That's what we got. And it was so cool because I'm used to a PC, you know, we have this giant tower and everything, but this iMac had everything in one thin body that just floated above the desk. And I was like, Whoa, this is so cool. It took a little getting used to cause it wasn't windows. You know, the layout was a little bit different than the software, but for some reason I was able to self teach it to myself way easier. I guess it just worked the way my brain worked a little bit more. I got used to it really quick. And just a quick note, I do dive more into this part of the story in episode two. So if you haven't listened to that, I highly recommend checking out episode two because that's when I talk about my I movie experience in depth where I first started video editing. So definitely check out episode two, but for now just kind of the overview of that buying that iMac is then what led me into I movie, which led me into self-teaching myself, video editing more from a technical perspective, not really from a writing perspective. I didn't really learn those more deep skills until later in life, but at least I was learning the technical stuff. And then that's when I started shooting with DV tape and then I started editing that stuff and I movie, and then a little bit later I moved to apples like pro-sumer, I guess you'd call it pro-sumer software. Finally that express it's like a movie on steroids. So then I started cutting video in there for several years. And then in 2011, when the new version of final cut pro 10 came out, I upgraded to that and I've been using that as my daily driver for my YouTube channel ever since. So that's kind of the chain reaction there of how I went from an iPod back into the Apple ecosystem to an iMac, to I movie to final cut express, to final cut pro and ever since then, video is a major part of my life. I like making videos for other people on the YouTube channel in my day job office for freelance, like doing it overall. I just like making things for people. Any medium. It could be a paper airplane. I don't care. I just like making things but video, especially. So since this, I mean obviously this episode does center around. I have two question. Okay. The day questions submitted by Ethan, his YouTube channel is random dudes doing random things. He submitted two good questions that are kind of Apple related. So I figured I'd include them. And if you want a chance to have your own phone questions answered on the show, feel free to tweet them to me on Twitter at the computer clan or just DM them. So here's Ethan's question are an Apple sheep. So back when I was a kid young, stupid teenager, yeah. That was like all I cared about. But looking back at that, I was a total idiot nowadays, no fricking way. I'm definitely not an Apple sheep. They are not perfect. They make some dumb decision. And until recently I recently upgraded my phone and my computer button until that time I haven't purchased an Apple product in years and I will not defend everything. They do like charging the magic mouse upside down. He had, you have to flip it upside down to plug it in to charge it. And then you can't use the mouse while it's charging stupid stuff like that. I won't defend, I'll poke fun at Apple any day of the week. No problem. And with their laptops, I haven't purchased an Apple laptop in like seven and a half years because I don't really like them. The decisions they made with the butterfly keyboard, even though they fixed that recently, that's still sucked with the failure rates and the touch bar and getting rid of all the ports and just going with Thunderbolt three USBC. Like they made all these decisions that I really didn't like. And they just kind of turned me away from their laptops. That's why I bought their desktop product, the iMac. I love that. But the fricking laptops, I haven't purchased one in seven and a half years because they just, they changed too much and it's just, I'm not digging it. But the good news is rumor has it that they're going to be reversing that they're going to be removing the touch bar. They already brought the scissor switch keyboard back. They're going to be bringing more ports back as well when they do the Apple Silicon transition with their new Mac book. So keep an eye out for a new MacBook pro this year with more ports and no touch bar and Apple Silicon, it's going to be pretty cool. And his other question is, is the merge at Apple park. Good. So I'll put a link to this in the show notes. I did a crazy Ken's tech misadventures episode where I visited Apple park and a bunch of other sites I couldn't get in the ring building, but I did where I could. So go check that out. And I do want to talk about that experience more in a future. No cameras allowed episode. So subscribe and stay tuned for that. But that's later for now. The short answer is, yeah, I think the merger is pretty cool. I bought some postcards and some shirts you can get exclusive merchandise that is only sold at those stores. They don't have them online or at any other stores only like at the infinite loop store and at the Apple Park Visitor Center store, of course you can find things on eBay and stuff, but then I don't think it's as special. I think it's more special when you get it from the headquarters store, like right there in Cupertino, California. But yeah, they have some cool merch there. Absolutely. So I had a CD player, then an MP3 player. The iPod got my attention. My parents surprised me with one and we bought that and then got back into the Apple ecosystem, which led to my first iMac, which I still have, which led to I movie and video editing, which led to final cut. And then a bunch of other things evolving my writing skills, my editing skills, software skills. And I've been doing video production ever since. And in way you could say it all started with this little iPod. And another thing I found interesting was my mom would journal when I was younger. So she wrote a bunch of stuff about these experiences. And I found a cool passage here that talked about the iMac, which I thought was really interesting here. And she wrote, I am sure that this iMac will be seen by you as antiquated in a few short months, but right now it is state-of-the-art you mastered I movie garage man, and more so I thought that was really cool. Yes. I, I tried writing music and grog man too. And I thought that was really cool because you know, I don't see it as antiquated again. I still have it. It still works. It's an awesome computer. And it did a lot for me in terms of developing what became my career choices. So I thought that was a cool piece of time travel history to scroll back to. And Hey, if you have any cool origin stories with your tech universe or you want to talk about even your first iPod, feel free to tweet me stuff. I sometimes like to retweet other people's experiences and stories. I know it's sometimes hard to fit stuff into only what 280 characters, but do your best. Sometimes photos will say a thousand words too. I like hearing about that kind of stuff. And Hey, if you like the show, definitely subscribe for more. I release episodes every Monday. Cause I like to turn people's Monday into a fun day and of course I can't make you do this, but I just have a favor to ask if you like the show, feel free to leave a review or at least a rating. Some apps require you to do both, but if you can at least just do the rating, that would be awesome. I'd love to see that very much only if you want to thank you either way. And if you want to help support the podcast and the YouTube channel and all the things that the computer clan does feel free to pledge to my Patreon. It's Patreon.com/KrazyKen “Krazy” with a “K” the link is in the description. And when you do so, not only are you supporting the computer Klein, you actually get some really awesome perks too. And I would make the argument. You get some awesome perks from us that a lot of other Patreon pages do not give for such a cheap price. So I like to think we're being extra generous with our perks and everything that you can get through it. So check that out. Patrion.com/KrazyKen “Krazy” with the “K” thanks in advance for your support. Stick around for more episodes every Monday and make sure you subscribe to the YouTube channel as well. For new episodes of crazy Ken's tech, misadventures tech talk, and anything else that may come up. Usually every Thursday, I like to post at least once a week, usually on Thursday. So subscribe on the YouTube channel as well. Subscribe to the podcast here. No cameras allowed and catch more of these episodes the Monday, but until then, all I can say is thanks for sticking with me, catch the crazy and pass it on.

*Transcriptions are auto-generated by a transcribing software. Sometimes, small edits are made by carbon-based lifeforms, but please excuse any inaccuracies.