I used to blog a lot more than I do now and if I do say so myself, I was not too shabby at it. Somewhere in the bowels of one of my computers lies a back up of the old site’s posts that I keep threatening the ether with resurrecting - so low have I sunk and so deep is my vanity. What’s held me back is that I can’t exactly lay hands on it (the backup). I’m sure i have it, I just don’t know where it is. Well, one of those nerdly pursuits that make the web such a wonderful place for half-stepping geeks like me has re-reared its head in my awareness - archive.org and its tasty Way Back Machine. In addition to letting me see what Google looked like in 1999 (hint - not much different than it does now), it’s given me access to all my old posts, after a fashion. Makes me misty just thinking about it. Eeh. Not really, but a fun little diversion nonetheless.

Hey, all. Just FYI, I’ll be AFK for a few days. Goin’ to Colorado! Should be fun. Back in a week or so.

I’ll own up to having been lazy during the install process, but I updated my Zune software, and now the software won’t see the hardware. The next step is to uninstall the software and try reinstalling it. Nothing about this is killer. There’s nothing on the unit currently that I would lose if by some stroke it had to re-Zune the thing. Still, it’s a bit of a pain.

Before anyone gets started, I won it at a user group meeting about 5 months ago. I debated selling it on eBay or something, and perhaps a stronger man would have, but I kind of wanted something that would play video and the screen sure was perty. After playing with it for a while, I came to a sort of peace with it. I commented to an acquaintance who was asking about it that I had a short list of about 8 things that I want a player of this class (portable, large capacity, screen for video etc.) to do - at least one I’d be actually paying for, and this player does exactly two.

For the record and for the future, here’s my list. For what it’s worth, I think I’m aiming a bit too high - or low depending on your perspective.

1. use a standard USB connection: The Zune does not.
2. double as removable storage: not without a dodgy bit of hackery.
3. related is that it not require a proprietary piece of software to manage things like content and playlists: Right. Like that’s ever been the Microsoft way.
4. use standard battery size and have removable batteries (i.e. cheap rechargables): Nope.
5. play lots of formats, including Vorbis and Theora (apparently, a pretty tall order): See number 3
6. FM radio: Score one for the Zune over the iPod.
7. external video playback: Yep, with a dealie you plug in the headphone jack.

√ х (hey look, unicode characters - I’ll have to remember that)

And while I’ll put up with a Zune, an iPod is completely out of the picture. Any annoyance I have with the Zune would be magnified by 10 with having to deal with iTunes. Evil, vile software. Your mileage may vary.

Update - All is well. I had the goofy thing plugged in when I was running the update. Apparently, updating the software was a two step process: first the application software on the computer, then the firmware on the player. I’ve been hearing reports of updates wiping out libraries and losing ratings of songs and such. My library’s intact and I never really used the ratings, so even if it’s the case, it’s no big loss for me. So far my main annoyances are really just having to do things differently than before. The interface on the player is a bit different, with things not being where they were before. The app software on the machine has gone from the quasi-functional appearance of the old app to this way-froofy pastel pink thing with slide animations, rounded corners and anti-aliased fonts. It looks like one of those really annoying all-Flash websites. Eh. Prolly just my age.