Is it Friday yet?
Sure feels like it should be. Car went to shop this morning for preventive maintenance and a check on the weird brake behavior. Sure enough, a broken tone ring again causing erratic behavior of the ABS system.
That's the second time, and I'm a very conservative driver. So I conclude that Ford is using inferior parts or that the design of this vehicle is deficient in that respect. At least it wasn't horribly expensive.
Spent much of the day trying to debug the "One Click Digital" software since the vendor (Recorded Books) couldn't be arsed to test it before trying to release it. Our observation: It works with iPod and iTunes, but fails with anything else. After talking to their rep today, we add: They apparently only tested it with iPod and ITunes. Duh. Pretty piss-poor design assumptions, guys.
It takes forever to download an audiobook from their server (up to an hour for a 16 hour recording, for instance.) Then it takes 20 minutes or so to get it transferred from the PC to the portable player. And after that, they tell you that it's on the player, go listen to it. It isn't on the player. It has vanished into a wormhole somewhere. I repeated this experiment three times with two different WMA formatted files. Then I tried a title (The Hound of the Baskervilles) that was unencrypted and just a standard MP3 file. That one took just as long to download and transfer, but at least it was findable on the player, with a little effort (listed as "Unknown title" and "Unknown performer" but it's there.) Unfortunately, for the MP3 format they have their files set up in such a way that the Sansa Fuze wants to play the chapters in reverse order, with the end of the book at the beginning. Obviously they never tested this monstrosity.
By contrast, the Audible Manager for Audible Inc. audiobooks transfers a book of equal length in less than ten minutes from web server to your player, Sansa included. Playback is excellent, and it always remembers where you stopped and restarts from there. "One hundred points to Audible" and "One hundred points from Recorded Books" I say.
While all this was going on, another four book shipments arrived on my desk, of course. No rest for the busy, I guess. I had gotten rid of the ones from yesterday, but I'm still buried.
That's the second time, and I'm a very conservative driver. So I conclude that Ford is using inferior parts or that the design of this vehicle is deficient in that respect. At least it wasn't horribly expensive.
Spent much of the day trying to debug the "One Click Digital" software since the vendor (Recorded Books) couldn't be arsed to test it before trying to release it. Our observation: It works with iPod and iTunes, but fails with anything else. After talking to their rep today, we add: They apparently only tested it with iPod and ITunes. Duh. Pretty piss-poor design assumptions, guys.
It takes forever to download an audiobook from their server (up to an hour for a 16 hour recording, for instance.) Then it takes 20 minutes or so to get it transferred from the PC to the portable player. And after that, they tell you that it's on the player, go listen to it. It isn't on the player. It has vanished into a wormhole somewhere. I repeated this experiment three times with two different WMA formatted files. Then I tried a title (The Hound of the Baskervilles) that was unencrypted and just a standard MP3 file. That one took just as long to download and transfer, but at least it was findable on the player, with a little effort (listed as "Unknown title" and "Unknown performer" but it's there.) Unfortunately, for the MP3 format they have their files set up in such a way that the Sansa Fuze wants to play the chapters in reverse order, with the end of the book at the beginning. Obviously they never tested this monstrosity.
By contrast, the Audible Manager for Audible Inc. audiobooks transfers a book of equal length in less than ten minutes from web server to your player, Sansa included. Playback is excellent, and it always remembers where you stopped and restarts from there. "One hundred points to Audible" and "One hundred points from Recorded Books" I say.
While all this was going on, another four book shipments arrived on my desk, of course. No rest for the busy, I guess. I had gotten rid of the ones from yesterday, but I'm still buried.
