And The Pod Played On

I'm writing this column while plugged into a gorgeously tactile white-and-chrome gadget the size of a cigarette pack that is giving me a better-than-CD-quality rendition of Hey Jude. For a music junkie like me, listening to tunes at work is not unusual. Listening on a portable device is. If this were a Discman or a regular MP3 player, I would be fretting right now about how much battery power I was wasting, and I would certainly have to hunt for another album before I reached the end of this page. But this tiny beauty, known as an iPod, has put 12...