Heat, Height and iPods

Today is the day the roofers come to rip off our hail-damaged shingles and replace them with insurance-paid 30-year shingles.
But the temperature is headed for the mid-90s and the heat index will be between 100 and 105.
It's going to be a day like the one Dave Barry wrote about where birds burst into flames in midair and nuns cursed openly on the street.
George, the foreman, (not George Foreman, the boxer and grill shill) told me last week that the only things that could stall the project would be rain or extreme heat. Besides being a health hazard for the workers, he said, extreme heat can damage the materials and compromise the water-tightness of the new roof.
Nevertheless, he just called to say the crew is on its way. So we shall see.
I spent a fair share of the weekend uploading music to my new iPod. The song count stands at 2,563 with five music videos, all of our prepped stock photos and some podcasts and I haven't even used the first 10 gigabytes of the 60-gig capacity.
I have to repeat my thanks to my sons and Maria for a fabulous birthday gift that I never would have bought for myself because I didn't understand how cool it is.
I'm rediscovering my CD collection in the process of ripping CDs to the iTunes software and it's a real treat to set it on "shuffle" and hear stuff I haven't heard in years.
I don't expect I'll take it on any hot weather motorcycle trips, though.
The owner's manual says temperatures over 113 will cook it and it shouldn't be operated in temperatures above 95 degrees. An extended period in a black motorcycle tank bag on a day like this would almost certainly kill it.
I don't find any mention of the effects of altitude in the manual, I've heard that devices that use a hard drive - like my iPod - can fail at altitudes above 10,000 feet.
I did a Google search for "ipod" and "altitude" and found this post by an iPod user named David Charlap:
Hard drive based iPods can be expected to fail if operated at high altitudes. In a hard drive, the heads do not contact the recording surface. They float above the surface on a small cushion of air, produced by the spinning platters. If the air is too thin to create this cushion, the heads will contact the surface, possibly even damaging it.
This isn't a problem in shipping, however. When the drive is not powered, the platters don't spin and the heads are "parked" on a region of the disk where contact with the surface won't cause damage.
Hard drives actually have "breather holes" in them. Small holes covered (internally) by filters (to keep out dust). This is necessary to equalize the air pressure between the inside and the outside of the drive. (See also "Air Circulation and Air Filtration")
On some drives (like an IBM laptop drive I'm looking at now) there is even a sticker next to the hole saying "Do not cover".
If you seal a drive, then changing temperature and altitude would create substantial pressure differentials between the inside and outside of the case. This would lead to drive failure (just like pressing on the upper cover while it's operating can cause failure), and maybe even physical deformation of the case.
I'm sure a drive manufacturer could design a specially-reinforced sealed case to work around this, but that would add significant weight, size and cost to the drive. If anybody makes such a drive, it would be intended only for extreme environments and would not be used in a typical consumer device.
So it looks like I'd be pushing my luck if I used it extensively at the home of my friends Tim and Linda who live at 10,500 feet in Alma, Colo., the highest town in the U.S.
Tim does a lot of computer consulting and I've not heard him speak of this kind of problem, so maybe you have to go farther up the mountain for it to become an issue.