So the X5L mentioned previously arrived last week. So far I like it a lot. I had to do some renaming initially as I copied stuff over, but I had to do an equivalent with the old thing anyways since ogg doesn't have track numbers but the metadata did. Anyways, I have a decent amount of stuff transfered over, and the rest has to wait until I boot up other machines (I didn't have much on the powerbook since I always had that with). Anyways, for starters the sound quality is awesome. The response curve is better than the old one, which I thought was better than a lot of other things. With a well encoded file it actually starts sounding rather similar to the original. The noise floor is awesome too. I initially didn't here it, but then I realized the background noise from the room through my earphones was just louder. There's nothing from the screen or drive though, just a very quiet hiss and a pop with the power switch. The UI takes a few seconds to get used to (a coworker said it made sense after about 30 seconds), and seems workable. The screen is bright and crisp, and easily readable from a decent distance or any angle. It doesn't take thinking and it's instant to turn the backlight on or off without affecting other things, which is nice. My only complaint is in audio mode it only updates a few times a second so the audio level graphs are kinda pointless. The thing feels slightly heavy for its size (but still reasonable), but I think that's probably due to the battery. I can pretty much unplug it in the morning when I go to work, use it all day (drive to work, work, drive home, evening at home), and not bother turning it off at all (like when I leave the office or go to lunch), and still have it barely drop off the top of the battery gauge. That is such a nice feature that way too many things lack. Stupid battery technology... Anyways, I have nothing but good things to say about it, so if you're in the market for a digital audio player, you should at least consider it.

As for the week at work, it was busy. I got power distribution for a rack moved to new circuits in one server room, and in the other one added 2 (sorta 3) new circuits. Should allow us to get everything up and running before school starts. Stuff also sorta blew up, but luckily none of it was my fault and I can't really do anything but sit back and wait for it to be fixed. I almost got another new server up, but I'm waiting for it to be able to reach stuff so it can be used. I think I finally got all the new student stuff figured out, and the system assigned permissions this morning. I still sent the list of changes it made to the student supervisors for verification in the morning since I don't know if they got me everything. I also got permissions for student workers for the rest of the school tied to contracts, which should hopefully save time for everyone (they say the access when requesting the job, don't have to think about having it added/revoked since everything's tied to contract dates and signing/termination). It'll be interesting to see how well that works after what's happened though - apparently they couldn't get contracts printed and signed in May, but had to wait until August to request them, so people may have a couple days waiting to get access after getting back and signing them. Such is life I guess, and maybe can be resolved next year.

The weekend was good, with sitting around and relaxing. First movie was Elektra which was better than expected (I had low expectations going in). Other than the intro when I put in the DVD that is. I have something funny if people want to see it. Anyways, the plot wasn't all that great, but it had fighting and martial arts and some interesting effects. Second movie was Wild Things 2. It was one of those where when I heard of it I was wondering how they could possibly do a sequel, so I had to see it. It's basically the same plot as the first one. Yes, same plot, although some of the characters have different relationship roles and some minor details are different. So yea, not such a great movie, unless you want to laugh at the movie. Third movie was Swimfan, which was better than expected. The plot was interesting, although nothing special. The soundtrack was interesting and well done technically, and they used some really interesting editing techniques. Like rather than draw out the scenes to simulate the normal emotion like most movies, there's multiple angles cut together with overlap sorta like a replay. That description actually doesn't do it justice, and it works way better than it'd seem at first. It's sorta combines a this is important with the character replaying what happened in their head to sorta make you look at it from their perspective. Yea, I'll stop before I totally mangle it. You should see if you haven't though.

So my bad luck finally managed to catch up to me. Sometime during the night last night the hard drive in my Karma managed to go into click mode, and I woke up to no music but a clicking and rather warm box. After a couple resets, hitting it on things, and letting it sit, it still isn't actually able to access the hard drive enough to boot before the bootloader times out and shut it off. I guess it's not too unexpected. I was probably lucky to have been able to get it back after the last time I had it go bouncing off each corner in turn across pavement and then rolling over a few times for good measure. Or the few times before that. That one actually involved me having to give it a drop of a few feet to unstick the heads (smacking it against hard surfaces from a few inches wasn't enough). Hard drives (even the 1.8" ones) aren't designed to take that sort of abuse, and after the last big tumble I'd occasionally notice it obviously trying to remap things on the hard drive and a few tracks suddenly being "bad". Unfortunately the drives are like half the cost of it, so I now have what's effectively an expensive paperweight.

So given the amount I use the thing, I began my quest to find a suitable repair/replacement. Repair involved hard drives, which are about as much as a new Karma, and I'd have to check compatibility and install it. eBay isn't much cheaper than new. Even though it's come down a third in price since I bought it, it's still kinda pricey for a device that's been effectively EOLed by the manufacturer. Off to the Intarweb. My main feature requirement is Vorbis support and good quality audio, with around 20GB of space being preferred (I had, while I guess still have, about 17GB on there). Those on IM were no help with suggestions other than iPod, which is out due to the lack of Vorbis and that &#!% wheel thingy. I don't like interfaces without a tactile response unless I'm looking at the screen - and for me a music player generally qualifies. The UI just seems unintuitive to me as well - I always have to use my second guess as to how to do something when I play with them. My first other idea was to use my Axim. It's handled the role temporarily before nicely, albeit the touch screen is a drawback - but at least it could have a custom interface. The fact that 8GB of storage costs over $600 and 4GB is over $200 pretty much shot that idea down though. I'm not going back to swapping a bunch of small cards again. So with my requirements I'm basically left with 4 players, one of which is the Karma.

After much reading reviews, checking comparisons, and looking up prices, I settled on the iAudio X5L. It has the Vorbis, and FLAC is an extra bonus. I don't care about color screens other than if they suck battery, as my Axim can play full xvid movies at 640x480, which no dmp can even approach. The X5L is rated for 35 hours of battery life, so that's not gonna be a problem. Reviews still place it in at somewhere over 30 hours. As a bonus the thing has a very strong, very clean audio output, with the highest S/N ratio out there. Apparently the output is very flat too, although it has plenty of adjustments. I contemplated for a second the lack of the 5 band agile equalizer and being locked into fixed frequencies, until I realized the only real use is to compensate for crappy headphones. It lacks crossfade which I'll miss. The ID3 database probably won't be an issue for me, as while Rio has awesome selection stuff in RioDJ, I never really used them. Having direct access to the files and ability to mount and generate m3us will actually be much nicer. As an added bonus this thing should be able to mount external drives to pull data across. It sounds like anything that complies with USB Mass Storage. Should be interesting to see how well it works. Theoretically it could double as a place to offload CF cards from the camera. Anyways, I'll have to post a review shortly after it arrives. Which will hopefully be early next week. I love that basic shipping from Newegg always ends up arriving the day after shipping.

The long weekend was nice, although there was way too much water up there. You could stand in knee high water on the docks if you wanted (well, except for the wood ones which were moved to land whenever they went underwater), and the boats were only in the water during the day when they could be parked on the lawn as needed. Not helping the situation any resulted in many storms with heavy rain and lots of lighting. They gave flash flood warnings, but I don't think anyone would have been too surprized at any level of flooding. Anyways, it provided lots of opportunity for me to sit outside and watch the rain while listening to music and sometimes taking (and more often attempting) pictures of lighting. Dave will be happy to hear that I did listen to some HA up there, and I'd have to say that's probably better than in the dark. I will admit I like it, but it gets tiring after a couple songs.

Anyways, issue number one with the weekend was I forgot the charger to my karma at home. That's an issue, because although it lasts like 15 hours, the weekend is a lot longer than that. The drive time was easy, because then the computer is usable (while I'm not driving at least), and it can be plugged in. After being unsuccessful in locating a charger by my high-tech text-to-intarweb gateway (aka schdav), and their support people not being able to tell me anymore than "we have to tell you that you can buy them through our web site" (odd, considering he did try to help me after that statement) and the same specs that are on the back of the unit, I came up with another good idea. My Axim has plenty of CPU and battery capacity (and a charger), BetaPlayer plays pretty much anything, and being that I have a digital SLR I have plenty of CF memory available. So I loaded up a decent amount of music on there, plugged in my headphones, and was quickly annoyed that the lowest volume level was quite loud - I think it's designed for normal headphones. Equalizers and preamp settings came to the rescue though, and I had a nice source of music all weekend. I'm actually sorta impressed by the sound quality, and the battery life was nice in that I could listen to music all day without any problem on the standard battery. Someone commented on it and my response was "the nice part about having too many toys is that they can start substituting for each other." And I'll stick to that. :)

Issue number two was with my phone. It wasn't so much that I locked myself out of it (sorta), but that by the end of the weekend I had a pile of voicemails and text messages I couldn't check and had no forseeable ability to check. Anyways, my phone usually stays on for months at a time. The only time I turn it on is if I've been out of service or on analog for most of a day and the battery goes dead, which is pretty much only out in the middle of nowhere. So of course out in the mountains of North Dakota, this is actually the case. As a side note ND is actually relatively solidly covered by VZW otherwise. And yes, the description is worse than Eagle Mountain in MN, but they're enough that there's natural forests and lakes up there. Anyways, I turn the thing back on and it's locked. Except it doesn't like my code, and being there's the months between restarts, I'm sorta iffy and try a few different things. I walk over to a digital area and try a reprogramming, and that doesn't work (probably because the phone was locked). Anyways, after trying off and on, and VZW being confused at the programming menus not letting me run them without it being unlocked (Nokia eliminated the concept of a default override security code and programming loopholes recently since it pretty much defeated the effectiveness of the locks when they were common knowledge), I decided to just switch phones when I got home, and bring it to a store the next day. After 10-15 minutes of letting the computer go at it, the guy told me the code, which turns out to be a truncated version of my previous one, that must have been set by the system during a recent update. I had tried it before, but after too many attempts it locks me out, and I hadn't been persistent enough at resetting and trying. At least I have a phone I can use for things other than incomming calls, calling my work phone, and calling customer service though.

Anyways, the weekend went well otherwise, and I'll hopefully post pictures sometime soon. We'll see how motivated I get on that one though.

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.

And the skips are gone. A while back I applied a firmware update to my Karma. It was a minor bugfix one, mainly detecting more types of corrupted audio files and allowing them to be partially played or flagged so they are disabled in playlists until corrected. This was all fine until I tried playing some tracks which are encoded in 320kbps vorbis. About halfway through the song it'd start skipping occationally and stuff. Only happened on those and most other portable players which can even play 320kbps don't do it well, so no big deal. I went and told it to rebuild the song database tonight and after pausing my song for about 2 minutes all is fixed. This firmware version also makes it so the ethernet works better and it just pauses during the transfer rather than actually stopping playback too, which is cool. According to the docs they fixed some unicode locality stuff and support UTF-8/16 and Kanji so maybe I can upload tracks with non-ascii names now. Can't argue with a player you can sync over ethernet and they release free upgrades to it every month or two. :)

Sunday went OK. I got home from church and couldn't get my email. Turns out the IMAP server crashed again. Brent's replacing that as soon as he gets back from vacation - hopefully it won't happen again until after he gets back. That meant a run in to Bethel, but luckily it was an easy problem to fix. I had tell a former student to stop writing bad code and loading down the shell server and do it right, but he seemed to take it well. If you have procmail available, a perl script which goes and shuffles things around through IMAP is just painful to yourself. After rebooting more bethelwulf nodes to stop the emails from them, left and headed to family birthdays. It had been months so there were a lot of birthdays. Was a decent time. I ended up loading up the back of my car and bringing home more toys, this time speakers. Stopped by my parents place to grab the amps to go with said speakers and for some reason the family was playing with a sphygmomanometer and decided to check my bloodpressure for fun (guess that's what I get for having so many medical people in the family). Of course the timing was just after I had just restacked a pile of amps downstairs and lugged two 7301s up the stairs. And they wondered why my systolic was a little high... Now I just need to buy or build a crossover and I can try and not blow out the windows in the house or burn up the wiring. They'd be great for the outdoor movie night idea, but nobody seems to like the idea of helping me move them. Something about the speakers being heavier than the amps or some crazy thing. May have to try it once though.

Monday was a Monday. Started sorting things out at work, working on more automation and stuff. Blah. After work I'm relaxing at home and the server room calls me to complain about its temperature. I tell it to stop calling people and ignore it for a while. Still bad so go in and check on it. Turns out Bethel had a power outages I thought was minor but the air conditioner didn't like them much. It was hot and humid, so I turned on the old unit and tried to get it to not drip all over the hallway. It sorta works so I leave. On my way out security is escorting an Xcel truck through campus. I saw said Xcel truck leaving when I got to work this morning - turns out there was more than one outage and apparently not minor. I know a lawnmower and a 220 line were involved in an incident on campus in the same general timeframe, but I think that's actually completely separate and happened this morning (unless they were mowing after 10pm, in which case no wonder they hit it).

Tuesday was routine as well. Dave forgot his DVDs, so we went to Wendy's instead. I also rebuilt one Windows server, and automated more stuff. We got free corn in the afternoon, and while not as good as past years it was still free. Finished off the day by making a list of IPs/hostnames and what I think they do. Tomorrow is the boss's last day before a week and a half of vacation, and Dave and I get to try and pick up the slack. We get to learn about everything he's done so far this summer tomorrow. Should be an interesting day...