iPod by Stealth

I've been reading all sorts of commentary about the white-headphone wearing zombies known as iPod owners. The New York Times touched on it about five months ago, and I have to agree — I find myself spotting the distinctive white wires and wondering which iPod people have. They have surpassed MP3 players, CD players, tape players, and even just plain radios combined at my gym, and that's not the only place I see iPod headphones out and about. (I even saw one person carrying his iPod in a dance club. This was clearly only for the purpose of showing it off — the DJ wasn't that bad.)

I'm a little more stealth about it, though, because I despise earbud headphones. They just don't stay in my ears, especially when I'm sweating and running on the treadmill. I've even tried the in-ear headphones, but to no avail. So instead, I wear old-fashioned black headphones with my second-generation iPod (the kind with actual buttons, if you can imagine that). Unless you see the player (also disguised in a black belt-clip case), you'd never know.

Related: my favorite iPod/iTunes trick. I set up a Smart Playlist in iTunes called "0 Play." The criteria are tracks that have never been played, random selection, limited to two hours. (I also set it to exclude some types of music, like classical, soundtracks, and audiobooks.) This gives me a great playlist for gym time, playing the newest music I've loaded, in random order — and starting the playlist name with a zero puts it at the top of my list of playlists.