Oh!! For a nice skip-free mp3 player!!

I love taking walks. All alone.
But nice music in my ears while I'm donig that really charges me up...makes me feel full of beans. I normally listen to stuff which has a lot of fast music like Aerosmith, The Rasmus and Green day.
I take these walks on a rather lonely stretch of the Outer Ring Road and have met all sorts of people including pimps, whores, truck drivers and of course policemen. No, I have not been mugged yet and I really hope that does not happen to me ever.
Coming back to the topic, I go on walks normally with my walkman or with my discman. Now over the last few days my disc-man has started skipping like a little girl who has just recieved a years' supply of vanilla ice-cream.
A little net-surfing told me that that is a normal complaint with disc-men (Is that right?? Disc-men???) I have a Sony DNF-610, which apparently is a very nicely designed system..with lots of engineering margin. So why this?? Looks like they have a mode which you turn on when you intend to do some slightly intense stuff with your disc-man which apparently increases the laser power. This hits you on the LED's life thing but will give you a skip-free playback for the duration of the rigorous stuff you intend to do with it. But over time, the LED's power would go down and your disc-man starts skipping.
I'm not very sure how correct all this was but anyway....

This has really led me into thinking that one should never buy stuff with moving parts if one can help it. (After all, you are moving, and so is the CD drive....your movement intereferes with the drive's movement and so you get skips).

That's why I'm not so crazy about the ipod with the HDD memory, since that fellow is also going to skip like hell. Atleast it has a good chance of doing that. I'll probably go for an ipod with the flash memory but those things are so costly!!!! (Not that the HDD ipod is not costly. It is. )
I'd really like to get my hands on one ipod shuffle or (better still!) an ipod nano, but I'm waiting for their prices to come down. Till then, my AIWA walkman will have to keep me company....
Its a pity since all the stuff that I really like listening to is in CDs and my discman skips so badly that I sometimes have had to take my walks on tip-toe....