Or, anyway, ripping CDs. I’ve just gotten a
Nomad Jukebox ‘Zen’ MP3 player, and
now I’m in the process of downloading my CDs onto it. It’s a tedious
process, made more tedious by the fact that all I’ve got here at home is
a dial-up connection.

Why does my Internet connection matter? Because of “CDDB”. If you’re
on-line, you can look up the title and track names and
other data about almost any CD you put into your computer’s CD drive.
Plus, it’s easy; the CD-ripping software that comes with the Nomad
Jukebox gets all of the data it needs automatically. This saves a lot of
typing.

The sequence goes like this: dial-up to my ISP, put the CD in the drive,
wait until the software downloads the track titles, ask the software to
rip the CD, close the ISP connection. And then, ten minutes later, do it
again.

It’s enough to make a guy seriously consider broadband.