Hello World

Last night, I pulled my Zen Xtra (40gig) out of a pile of crap. My first thought was "what the eff is that?" Then, I remembered, "oh, yeah. That's the mp3 player I used to use at work. Why'd I stop using it? It would be great to have all my music accessible in my office!" So I updated its hard drive with all the music I'd gotten since I stopped using it in July of 2004, and brought it to the office.

Upon which point I began to remember just why, exactly, I stopped using it.

It is slow. It's literally a second of dead air in between songs, and selecting a new playlist or browsing artists or whatever, or just navigating the menu system, is filled with delays and even occasional freezing-up.

It is not user-friendly at all. You know how most players have a "shuffle all" function that is easy to find? Well, not here. You know how to get to that with this magical device? Menu (although you actually get to the menu using the back button--what the fuck?) > Music Library > Play any track. How "play any track" translates to "play entire catalog," I have no idea. It makes no sense at all. Also, you better have it set to shuffle already before you do any of that. Blah. Stupid. A perfect example of how annoying this thing is to use.

The file loading process sucks. It takes forever, and you have to keep the player plugged into the electrical socket because the USB connection doesn't charge the device. Also, although it sometimes stores the id3 tags (you know, the information about who is playing the song and what it's called and all that--somewhat important stuff), sometimes the only info you get is "05 Track 05."

It's a big and awkward fucking thing. Now, okay, size isn't so important in this case, since I'm just planning on sitting it on my desk, connected to my headphones/speakers. But let's get back to the awkward. The buttons are laid out such that, when you're walking around with this huge brick of an mp3 player in your jacket pocket, you can kind of use them efficiently. But when it's sitting on your desk, it's really irritating having to get at tiny side buttons whose functions you can't see from the front (compare this to the iPod's click wheel on the front).

Anyway, this is a more-or-less obsolete player now, I think. So basically I just wasted your time whining about a device that, unless you already made the mistake of buying it, will never affect your life at all.

I am accepting offers for it, if you're interested.

My friend emailed me to ask what kind of mp3 player she should get. ( Here's my response )

All this talk of Apple's new iPod Shuffle makes me wonder: why do mp3 players still come with shitty headphones? The Shuffle, especially, is targeted towards people who already have a player, but generally who the hell in this day and age doesn't already have headphones? Is the number big enough that it doesn't make more sense to drop prices by 5 bucks and let those few luddites buy headphones on their own? I have a rats-nest of cables and wires on my floor as a result of the redundant crap I get with every single electronics purchase I make, and I am sick of it. Apple, those white headphones fucking suck. Either improve them or stop putting them in the box with every mp3 player you sell. This white wire cult is idiotic--it's basically an advertisement to the world announcing "I value conformity over comfort" and it makes me sad.

Quick thoughts:


The Mac Mini is cute, but too expensive. It will be an enormous fucking hit.

The iPod Shuffle is awesome but many many people will not buy it because it lacks a screen. Nonetheless, it weighs LESS THAN AN OUNCE, is smaller than a pack of gum, and is incredibly cheap when compared to flash drives of equal memory size. I think I will probably get one to replace my current flash player, which primarily accompanies me on nights out for the walk home. This thing was made for the change pocket in my jeans.

Yesterday, my mp3 player broke in an annoying way: the volume up button doesn't work. Everything else is copacetic, though--I just can't mess with the volume, lest I decrease it below my hearing threshhold. Some people would react to this by sending it back to the manufacturer for repairs, and I may just do that. But I am also a fool with money (and we know what the result of that combination is). So I did a naughty thing. I know it's overpriced (the 15 gig ipod is only $50 bucks more), but it's also kind of underpriced (a flash-based player with 1/8 the storage capacity is priced more or less the same). And the thing is, I don't want or need to carry all of my music around with me. 4 gigs, about a thousand songs, is definitely more than enough to last me a week or 10--my experience with a player with more storage was that shuffle kept bringing up songs that I had downloaded on a whim years ago and never wanted to hear again. So I'll spend a fun afternoon going through my mp3s and pick the songs/albums/artists worth carrying around with me and never look back.

Of course, so many of you jerks have ordered the mini that they probably won't be shipping mine til next month. Thanks a lot, jerks.


Unrelated: if you hate giving out your email address online (and who doesn't?), you owe it to yourself to check out mailinator.