I am analog. And a little digital.

Even though I was an early adopter of MP3 player technology and geeked out at hacking my Nomad Jukebox to hold a 60 gig drive, these days I find myself living a sort of odd hybrid digital/analog life (and here, I'm counting CDs as analog, using "analog" as a synonym for "physical").

These days, I don't drive around with my large capacity MP3 player. Partially because it gave up the ghost and partially because my listening habits in the car have shifted towards podcasts rather than throwing all my music on shuffle play. So, while driving, my tiny 1 gig iAudio 5 is my weapon of choice, usually filled with four or five good-length podcasts.

At work, I have a 150 gig external Firewire drive that, over time, I've filled with music. Mostly ripped, some downloaded from MP3 blogs. So, though I bring CDs into work, I usually listen to them and then end up ripping them.

At home, though, I almost never listen to music in a non-physical format. It's CDs or records. The exception is in the baby's room, because she has her own Mac Mini with plenty of iTunes playlists. (Seriously.)

Speaking of records, as I've been moving my records into a new storage unit in the basement, I've been rediscovering a lot of old favorites. I realized that for almost every record I have a story, an odd little historical factoid, or I remember where and when I bought it. With a few thousand records, that makes me feel like some sort of savant. "Definitely... definitely bought this at the Trading Post for $1.00 in 1993... definitely had lots of Rap-A-Lot promos... time for Wapner..."

I do think that eventually I'll have a pretty nice all-digital set-up at home. Once I can get a few terabytes of space and suitable wireless capability, I get to transferring selected music to that. But for now, I'll continue to live a hybrid digital/analog life.