The music isn't that dead...

I'm not sure now how close my iPod is to death. I think that most of the sync issues (and the iPod being wiped clean) were caused by having my phone plugged in at the same time, iTunes seems to get confused and writes enough to the iPod to erase the library file, but tries to write the new library to the phone (which doesn't work). As long as the phone isn't plugged in, things seem to sync OK this week. (I know over the weekend though that I did a number of syncs without the phone plugged into the PC, and the iPod was still corrupted...).

However, as I'm listening to music I'm hearing all sorts of bad glitches... The music generally plays, but there are noticeable audio dropouts and clicks in almost everything I listen to. When I check the same files on the PC, they are OK - so there does seem to be some ongoing hard disk problems...

I could say that I've been through a rollercoaster of emotions this week - thinking that my music player was kaput, then its back, then back to somewhere in the middle... I'm not that attached to the thing though - I do need the music to be productive at work - things seem empty without music while I'm typing. However, in the big scheme of things, my family is a lot more important than a silly piece of glass and plastic, so I'm not exactly shedding tears over the thing...

A day at the fair

We went to the Lake County Fair today. The kids, of course, wanted to go on the rides, and once we said that that was enough rides, there was much wailing (and maybe some gnashing of teeth). They would have been happy to only do all the rides. (The consolation that was offered was that we plan to go to Six Flags next week, and they can do all the rides their little stomachs can handle...).

Along with the midway was Fair Food -in this case elephant ears. (A bunch of batter dropped into boiling oil to cook, then coated with powdered sugar). Here's John with a good coating of powdered sugar...He had sugar on his shirt, his face, in his hair... Good things its Bath Night!

The Day the Music Died...

I am in semi-mourning... My 30GB iPod is on its last legs, dying quietly (pun intended) after only 18 months... I've started getting errors that iTunes can't read the contents of the iPod, but those only happened when I also had my phone connected to the PC, and I figured that iTunes was getting confused about driver letters. Now, the errors come every time, and the iPod has an annoying habit of coming up completely blank (no music) after finishing a 3+ hour sync (there is almost 30G of music to load, after all...). Looks like the hard drive is failing, which isn't too surprising considering all that the little box has been through. I'm still hopeful that I can get it to behave a bit more, but after 3 days it doesn't look good - something is broken. Yesterday it was really hard to get work done without some music to listen to...

So - how do I keep up with podcasts, carry around enough music to listen to, and not bust the budget (which won't easily support a replacement - not with end-of-the-month bills all due in the next week)? I'm going to try downsizing my 'carry along' music and using my Motorola Q smartphone to fill the role of music player. I have a podcast manager/player (beyondpod - available at http://www.codeplex.com/beyondpod) already loaded, which will directly pull podcasts onto the phone (no more syncing!). There is already a media player on the phone, and being a Windows Mobile based product, Windows Media Player on my PC knows how to manage the file store. Just a little problem with space.... I found a great deal on an 8GB flash memory card for the phone on Amazon.com - $37 including shipping (compared to Best Buy wanting $149.99 for the same thing).

I'll just have to work out what music to load in, I can't load everything anymore... (That was why I had the 30G iPod - I can carry my entire music collection, and am likely to always have what I'm in the mood for...) I think that with 8GB I can carry enough styles of music to manage, but it will take more work to keep things fresh and updated... We'll see how things work out, there's always Christmas coming up in 5 months!

More on being a troll

I said earlier that my 'troll' title comes from an interpretation of my last name. For people familiar with the troll dolls (with the wild hair) that came out in the 80's, and people who know me, that type of troll also can apply. My hair is just long enough now to have major bed-head in the morning, sticking straight up like one of those troll dolls (but without the wild neon colors...). It may not be as long as the troll dolls, but still the way it sticks up does remind people of those dolls... (and the trolls as drawn by Jan Brett).

Travel thoughts

I read a great travel quote yesterday - "I love to travel, its the arriving that I hate." - attributed to Albert Einstein. That almost summarizes my thoughts toward travel. I travel a bunch for business, 11 trips last year, probably only 5-6 this year. That combined with personal travel (mostly by car) comes up to around 25% of the time that I'm not around. Looking at my stats on flightmemory.com, I have entered in 185 flight segments, for over 500,000 miles - and that's just the trips I have information for, starting around 2002. I have plenty of trips before that. I've earned 1K status on United (flew >100,000 miles last year, as they measure), which comes in useful on family trips when things go wrong.

I look forward to each trip, getting into the planning, checking what movies will be on the flights, finding out about the airports and cities I'll be going to, how to get to the hotel, etc. Flights can be annoying, but kind of fun too - I really like flying. Being at the destination, though for me is different than the quote above - I'm already looking forward to the return trip.
The big disadvantage for me is that on business trips I tend to be alone, and I really hate to go into a restaurant alone, and eat alone, with nothing to do but look at the other patrons in the restaurant. Since much of my travel goes outside the US, I also get to play 'the ugly American', since I can only order and converse in English. (Not that I haven't tried picking up some basics in other languages, but I've traveled to Copenhagen, Prague, Hong Kong, Amsterdam, Brussels, Munich, Beijing and will be going to Lisbon - that's a lot of languages...)

So, I really look forward to traveling, but am not really happy at the destination, the trip is more about getting there than the destination.

Are lightning bugs scared by lightning?

Driving home last night with all of us in the car, there was a pretty impressive lightning storm in the distance, with some awesome ligtning. One of the kids asked if lightning bugs got scared of the lightning. My answer was to pretend to be a lightning bug (in a high buggy voice) -

"Pretty flashing lightning, you look like just my type. I think I love you. I light my butt to show that I love you." (with appropriate behind wagging).

The kids thought that was hilarious, and we've had a lot of "I light my butt for you" since then.

Boys and dirt go together

One of the fun things about having boys is being reminded of all the ways that one can get dirty. Last night, out for a walk in the neighborhood with the boys, I stopped to talk with a neighbor. The boys, not exactly keen on being part of the conversation, started a wide ranging "Star wars" play, using sticks as light-sabers. Seeing them all the time, I really just focused on seeing that they weren't getting too wild, and hurting themselves (or anything else). In the course of the activity, they found an area of new dirt and mulch nearby, and since sword play involves falling down when hit, they were basically rolling in the dirt. I didn't notice this until it was time to go home - their arms and legs were gray! They had a lot of fun outside, ran off a lot of energy, and showed that they are true boys, with an affinity for finding dirt even where I wouldn't think it possible.

Are we what we search?

Reading on MSNBC.com (http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/25509046/) about a case using the types of searches as a defense - namely, that what the people in the area search for reflects the morals of the people in that area. In the case, they showed far more searches for pornography than for 'America' or 'apple pie'.

Not sure that is a valid defense - namely, there are a few points that the article points out. We don't know why the search term was entered, is it out of curiosity, or some less ideal desire? One point that occurred to me that isn't mentioned is that the relative scarcity of a search term, especially something that is as common or well known as apple-pie, doesn't reflect that people aren't interested in that object, but may reflect that people already know about the object and don't have to search for more information... So, the popularity of search terms doesn't really reflect accurately all the interests of the community doing the searches, since interests that are well known by the community will be under-represented.

Another case of garbage-in->garbage-out data. Not all of the data is going into the study for the defense, so an anomalous garbage conclusion is reached.