iPods and cars

I'm at the point now where it's an enormous pain to try and uncheck songs from iTunes for syncing to my first iPod (a 20 gig 3rd gen model). I did an iTunes song "upgrade" and the replacement files are all twice the size due to the larger bit rate. I'm about a half gig over budget. This is the iPod I use in my car with a radio transmitter made for that specific generation of iPod (with the funny little extra plug in it).

I'd like to just switch to my other iPod, but I really don't want to spend money on another transmitter because I assume the next car I'll buy, hopefully a year or so from now, will have a good old fashioned auxiliary jack and I won't need to go through the radio.

My car has two payments left, incidentally, and I actually briefly entertained the idea of buying a new one while watching the Cavs game the other night, littered with Toyota Prius ads. That was pretty stupid. Frankly, I'd like to enjoy a good year or more with no car payment.

So I think 2010 might be the year. I'm not confident that Toyota will sell the Prius as a plug-in by then, but the new body style and slightly higher efficiency are enough reason to wait. Oh, and apparently someone leaked a video with Blue Man Group in it (you can see the poster frame here, but the video was taken off of YouTube). I hope that the crashing demand for new cars doesn't kill the development of more fuel efficient cars.