WHY!?!?

The first time I heard someone (my friend Dale) suggest putting a PC in your car to play mp3s I laughed at him.  Why would you need a PC in your car?  How would you keep the hard drive from crashing?  How would you get new music to it?  It just sounds like more trouble than it's worth!

Now I don't know how I ever handled having a CD player and I don't think I'll ever go back.  I've got well over a hundred CDs and it's hard to keep that many disks in your car.  It's even more difficult to keep them in any kind of organized fashion.  Sure they make those books that hold like 120 CDs but for some reason they always ended up having all the CDs taken out.  Even if I could keep them in that book, it just made it a nice way for the guy who busted out my window to take off with my thousands of dollars worth of disks.  Yes, it's happened to me twice.  I dealt with this for years despite the inconveniences.  Unfortunately CDs can only be tossed around irreverently for so long before those scratches start to take their toll.  Two of my favorite Green Day CDs (1,039 Smoothed Out Slappy Hours and Dookie) were so scratched that you couldn't listen to either one all the way through.  No amount of cleaning seemed to help.  I spent a little time at www.mp3car.com and it became clear to me that I had most of what it took to make a mobile mp3 player just laying around on my shelves.  In the middle of the night I leapt into action, throwing spare parts in a box.  A day or two later I had a PC sitting in the passengers seat of my car driving through Taco Bell.  The people at radio shack thought I was insane when I was trying to describe why I needed a Ground Loop Isolator, and couldn't believe it when I showed them my car.

Now I laugh at people who can't find their CD's.  I have over 320 CDs in my car, and I never have to look for more than 20 seconds to find one.  I have a tape deck.  Hopefully that window breaking thief won't be interested in it, and if anyone broke into my trunk and took my caseless bungee-corded-together PC they would at least look like a complete idiot.  It's not pretty, but it works.