Last week we received a ‘free’ exercise bike with the points that we’d accumulated at one of the indian casinos and my wife surprised me by saying she wanted an iPod to listen to while working out. We visited Costco this morning and picked her up the 80GB iPod ($339 USD). She wanted the black one instead of the traditional white. The last one at Costco.

The tiny package contains only white earbuds, a dock connector, a USB connector for charging and syncing, a soft black pouch to hold the iPod and of course the black iPod itself.

One thing I really like about the iPod is how easy it is to sync up your music collection. You just plug the thing in and it talks to iTunes and voila, the tunes move across to the iPod. At the bottom of the iTunes screen it tells how many songs you have and how much space it’s using: 1,184 songs is a long way from the 20,000 the device holds. I can’t imagine having 20,000 songs loaded in the device. That’s probably a lifetime worth of music for our whole family. More likely will be adding TV shows or movies. I’m itching to check out the show Jericho after talking to Rob and Dana at Webtalk Guys on Saturday.

Watched a couple minutes of the free Blade episode and the video looks alright. I notice that some shows like Prison Break are selling season passes ($39.95 for Prison Break) which enable those who buy to receive all current episodes and future episodes as they are released. Good idea.

The movie selection is weak, but will have to give it time there to ramp up like the TV section which now has TV shows from A&E, ABC, Adult Swim, Animal Planet, Biography Channel, Bravo, Cartoon Network, CBS, CNN, Comedy Central, Discovery Channel, Disney, E!, ESPN, FOX, Fuel TV, FX, History Channel, Jetix, Logo, MTV, NBC, NFL, Nick at Nite, Nickelodeon, PBS, Sci Fi, Showtime, Sleuth, SOAPnet, SPEED, Spike, The N, TLC, Travel Channel, TV Land, USA and Warner Brothers. There is bound to be something appealing in this TV lineup both past and present with prices at $1.99 per episode. I was looking forward to checking out Heroes from NBC, but the pilot episode is somewhat mysteriously missing.

My wife doesn’t like the iPod earbuds and has her eye on one of the kitchen dock kits. I was checking out the selection of nine games and don’t see the package any more for buying all of them. Is that deal gone? Not sure it’s worth paying $4.99 each, but would like to try at least Pac-Man on the iPod.

Weighing in: how to calculate your Body Mass Index (BMI)
The other day I looked down at the scale and jumped off when I saw the number 189.5. That’s the heaviest I’ve ever weighed, so I, too, plan to ride at least 10 miles on the bike every day. We’ll see how long I can last and how many miles I can get up to (here’s to hoping that this doesn’t go like last year’s YMCA experiment). Our oldest teenager is also going to be riding the bike. I was playing Doom on Xbox Live earlier today while riding. There is definitely something strange about trying to play video games while riding an exercise bike.

According to the Body Mass Index generator today I’m at 184 and it still shows me a little overweight. My goal is to get under 170, which would put me back in the “normal” weight category at my height.

Any readers willing to share how you are doing with your BMI?

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