Jeepers, why all the Apple dislike? I have to admit that I used PCs at work and was pretty good with them, back in the old DOS days. Then I quit my job and went to grad school, which had the old original Apple computers. Oh, the joy of using a mouse! The user interface with icons, instead of having to remember each and every little DOS command. I became an Apple convert then and there and have never looked back. I work on a PC (literally, I only use one at work), and play on my iMac. And I went out the very first day the very first iPod went on sale and bought one. They were tucked away in the back of the Apple store, around a corner. The sales person I asked didn't even know where they were and had to ask someone else for help. How things have changed in that regard. lyban, if you get an iPod and have any questions about iTunes or anything, I'll be glad to try and help.

DH has Sirius in his Sierra pickup, and we both love it. We have our favorite channels programmed in and it's very simple to push a button and listen to our favorites. We always take the Sierra when we travel by road, because it's so comfortable and has the locking bed cover to keep our luggage safe and out of sight. Sadly, my Sienna minivan doesn't have Sirius. When we fly, we still use an Ipod that has our favorites downloaded onto it. We carry a hookup for both our headphones so that we can relax together and drown out on board noise. We even could use it at the pool while on our vacation to Cancun a week ago. So small and so convenient. We will be getting new cell phones within the month and will probably put music onto them next.

I do not use iTunes or any Apple products. I still have my collection of CDs, but I have them stored in books so that they do not take up much space. I have ripped all my CDs (using Windows Media Player), and then I transfer the music I like best onto thumb drives that I take with me. I use a thumb drive at work and listen to music using Winamp (not my favorite program, but I've been using is for many years at work), and at home on my computer I use AIMP, another free program that I like better than Winamp. In the rest of the house, I plug a thumb drive into our sound system and listen to using through that, and in my car, I have a CD player (no USB port), and so I listen to MP3s that I have stored on a CD disc, which will hold quite a few. My brother got a new sound system for his truck that has a USB port, and so we use thumb drives for that. Neither my brother nor I like iTunes, and we both do sound editing on MP3s, which is easier to do than with iTunes. I refuse to buy anything from Apple. I do listen to the radio occasionally, as we have a good university station here in Westchester from Loyola Marymount: KXLU. The university is very close to the beach, and so a lot of the DJs sound like surfers and can be a bit ditzy, but I'm okay with that. My clock radio alarm is set to that station.

Along with heated seats and mirrors, my Audi has a heated steering wheel option that I love. Both the seats and steering wheel heat almost instantaneously. Although it's not as cold here in the PNW as some places, I love having a warm steering wheel most days/mornings of the year. I also wanted a back up camera, as I'm always delivering and picking up my grandson from school and those little ones can be hard to see walking behind the car. One feature I hate about this car, though, is they placed the bright headlight indicator on the lower left side of the instrument panel and, even though I'm not particularly short, I cannot see it without raising myself up to peer over the steering wheel. Not the wheel, but the center spoke/bar of the wheel; it hides the indicator. My good fried with a newer Volvo SUV says the same is true in her car...she can't see the indicator without lifting herself up to see over the wheel spoke. It also has the radio controls on the center console, so if you bump it or set your purse on the digital station settings, it whacks everything up and you lose all your presets. It's obvious that men engineer all these vehicles as the features are often not female user friendly.