ScatteredGenius.com

Storytime.

Back when I was a young warthog in college-school, I saved my pennies to buy what would be the first ever portable MP3 player, the Diamond Rio 300. THIRTY TWO MEGABITES OF MP3 POWER. That’s like BARELY a CD album nowadays but at the time it was amazing. Twelve+hours on two AA batteries, no skipping. It’s the stuff of legend. LOOK AT THIS BADBOY.

Remember, this was also heavily in the throes of the MP3 downloading boom. Our campus was one of the ledgendary few that weren’t blocking P2P programs like Napster, even though our bandwidth was getting raped. One of my roommates and I even ran the first show on the casual college radio station to use MP3s only. You could call into the show (or instant message) and we could even play songs from your computer if you shared them. Kinda awesome.

So I had this crazy idea. We were going snowboard that year. I had just set up the MP3 player. I also had a pair of battery-powered speakers, and a backpack I wasn’t using. I figured hey, let’s listen to some damn tunes while we snowboard.
I filled the MP3 player with dozens of MP3s encoded at the lowest quality possible, we were able to fit hours and hours of songs onto the player. All good stuff like TV show themes (A-Team, Hawaii Five-O,) movie themes like Highway to the Danger Zone, or I’m Alright (Kenny Loggins FTW!) Also some of the good stuff at the time like Prodigy, Crystal Method, Chemical Brothers, and my favorite of favorites, Fatboy Slim. You press play, pop the mp3 player into two socks to soften any falls, and then loosely into a plastic bag, in case it’s soggy. Speakers got fresh batteries, and also had a power switch that basically turned them on and off, into quiet or loud levels. The speakers were pretty loud.

We ended up fighting over who got to wear the backpack down the mountain.

Get this, they are still selling this bad boy on Amazon for 130$? Amazon.com: Rio PMP 300 MP3 Player: Electronics THIRTY TWO MEGABYTES OF SPACE. I might just buy it just because.