A new toy

I came home from work to find a package with the item pictured at left and an "Enclosed please find your gift" letter. Although I guess it's barely a gift as it'll probably be on a 1099 - I'm not going to complain though.

So far I'm mostly happy with it. Other than a ridiculous level of background hiss noticeable in any quieter portions of music (or between songs, or when paused), the sound quality is quite good. I think this may be attributable to the ridiculously overpowered headphone amp (even with the included headphones I hope nobody listens at over about a third), and the fact that it's much less noticeable with the included headphones (of course most of the detail in music is gone too). I may have to try an attenuator. I'm still not a real fan of the scroll wheel - now that I actually own one though it'll be interesting to see how much I use it compared to my other player. The better song selection because of the ID3 database may push me towards it, but the having to use an installed program and only Windows/OS X to sync music (and having to re-rip to MP3) may push me away. At least this thing is supposed to have a halfway decent battery life.

iPod and the plane

this is a funny (and ridiculous) story. He told them what it was, they still overreacted. The Canadian customs guy sounds like a jerk too.

On Saturday my brother came home with an iPod Mini. I played with it for a few hours, attempting to see if I could get it working with his Windows 98 machine (pending replacement but on hold for now as different schools have different requirements). I could mount it fine, but only with formatting. I tried to load the Windows formatting and software. Unfortunately while I have a few virtual 2000 and XP machines on my Mac, the USB hooks bind to the Mac and the iPod triggers way too many automount hooks in the OS. It simultaneously starts iTunes and starts mounting the drive. Given it attempts a hard mount it then deciding after a delay to give the device to the virtual machine with predictable results. That's all usable if the iPod didn't like to reboot on dismount causing the virtual machine to lose the connection and the process to repeat. And if the OS doesn't grab it within a certain time from connection of the USB connection the iPod will no longer accept an attempt until the connection is removed and added again. For all the plug and play they claim... You also can't just reformat and restore the directory structure - apparently the iPod system is either embedded in the filesystem or differs based on the filesystem. So no HFS+ to FAT32 conversion works either. I finally ended up just setting it up on my mac and telling him to copy his music over and I'd add it. In the process with a couple CDs I got to learn the annoyances of iTunes CD importing (such as renaming tracks while importing won't affect ones that have already started ripping - that one's really annoying). I like just dropping the music player on an ethernet port, looking at its IP, and saying "add these files" and it works.

After I finally just went for the mac exclusive approach on the thing, I decided to test it out and copied a few hundred songs over to test the interface and quality. Sound quality seemed rather good, although the output seemed a little weak. I didn't do any real comparisons and it's been a while but nothing really sticks out in my mind as problematic there. The one thing that really annoyed me was the scroll wheel. It doesn't like me. I could drag my finger around in circles sometimes and it wouldn't detect me. Get away from it and come back and it'd usually work. I think it may be a capacitive style touchpad, which could possibly explain it given the combination of humidity and temperature of the room and my fingers. The multifunction aspect of it annoyed me as well. It has to require a bit of movement so it doesn't sense movement when you're pushing a button. Yet it has to be sensitive enough that large motions don't require many times around to get it. They actually seem to have done a very good job of balancing that, but it still bugs me. I like things that respond instantly and consistently, not with a slight variation. Speaking of which, how do people deal with the slow UI? I pretty much have the same rant with it as with Windows and OS X. I guess people are just used to it and think that's how computers are supposed to act or something. I did have a little fun with the Music Quiz game, although it seemed that game is mainly hard because it's hard to select the right song with that crazy scroll wheel. It'd take two or three attempts to get the cursor over the right song, and hope it didn't move when I took my finger off to hit the select. I got a score of 69060 after 160 songs, but that's probably not that good.

First movie of the weekend was Tangled. It's a rather messed up but interesting story. They explain everything until it makes sense, and then start ripping it apart again. Second movie was Simone. It had good parts and bad parts. It seemed to describe our culture rather well. In other news, Shatner quote of the week - "Let 'em move to Canada. Freeze his balls off." Also an awesome quote from Slashdot. "Wetware too is vulnerable to buffer overflow exploits. Annoy a person for long enough and they'll do what you say just to get you to stop talking." As far as TV goes, this is probably better for them in the long run anyways.

In the work world it's been busy. I sent out notices to a bit over 3500 people on Friday that I am going to delete their account in a couple weeks. I've gotten a decent number of replies, and had the registrar's office fix some dates on courses or sent people to get thesis extensions properly recorded in the system. Most of them are people wanting exceptions though - what else is new. I've also been tracking down load on one of my systems. Some stuff late night was seriously spiking the load. Turns out it was the building collection of requests some of our computers do when they boot, some of them up to a dozen or so http calls to report different things, request data, etc. With them all being database driven, and a few hundred machines rebooting simultaneously... I ended up optimizing a bunch and think I may change how some of the stuff that doesn't need to be as real-time is done. Other than that I've been adding more features elsewhere, which may or may not have adverse effects on system load. It should be interesting to see. Huh. I wrote a lot again.