We have three kids and not enough space. Lauren’s idea of enough space is a 5500 acre horse farm in New Zealand but that’s for another day. However, having an MP3 player - especially one with Audible books on it - means that I can have a little oasis of peace wherever I am…for writing, working on graphics or just resting. At least until someone grabs my headphones and leaps on me.
Hmmm…maybe that’s why the call it Zen.
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But seldom seen…this is a Laurencino - espresso, milk, sugar, ice, chocolate made by hand by my lovely and talented wife. Yum!
technorati tags:espresso, drink, photo, macro, straw, ice, coffee
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The Modern Library | 100 Best | Novels
That there is a list of the ‘100 Best Novels’ as voted by two groups…
1) the editorial board of Modern Library which is authors, professors and other literary types…people like William Stryon, Maya Angelou, Oliver Sacks, Joyce Carol Oates and so on.
2) a reader’s poll which was open to anyone who wanted to vote
The top novels in the board’s list works by Joyce, Fitzgerald, Nabakov, Huxley and so on…the only person mentioned twice in their list is James Joyce, The reader’s list is interesting because the top two books are by Ayn Rand and number three is by L. Ron Hubbard. In fact, the reader’s list contains four Ayn Rand books and three L. Ron Hubbard. Huh…you don’t think there was some mass ‘get out the vote’ drive among Objectivists and Sciencetologists, do ya?
I’d read something recently referring to similarities between Objectivism and Sciencetology, but I shrugged them off…no pun intended. It’s also interesting that in NewTek‘s heyday the company was headed up by Objectivist Tim Jenison and a (former) Sciencetologist, Paul Montgomery.
technorati tags:sciencetology, objectivist, hubbard, rand, newtek, ayn, L., Ron, books, cults
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I spent time last night un-fucking the songs on Yahoo Music so I could put them onto the Creative Zen V. It’s kind of confusing and technical but I’ll try to explain. In the normal course of events, when you play music from Yahoo Music Engine, it streams directly from the internet. In other words, the music isn’t really on your computer. If you want to transfer music to a portable device from Yahoo! Music Unlimited, you need to transfer it to what they call My Music. My Music means it’s on your computer, in theory. But you have an option to just ‘bookmark’ stuff when you add it to My Music, which means it doesn’t put it on your computer and - drum roll - that means that you can’t transfer bookmarked My Music to your device because it’s not on your computer.
So I had a bunch of stuff that was in My Music but most of it was bookmarked, not on the computer. So I had to go through and select the bookmarked stuff and convert it to a downloaded version. I could have avoided all this by not ever bookmarking stuff but just downloading it all in the first place but I didn’t want to overfill the harddrive. Still - this shit should be automatic. The whole iTunes thing of paying a dollar a track sucks - Yahoo, with millions of track for six bucks a month is better…but I’m a technical person and it took ME hours to get everything working. A normal person’s head would explode, or really - they’d just give up and buy an iPod and make Apple more rich and arrogant. And I’m not even getting into the tracks that I had to re-license or remove from a playlist and then re-add.
On a brighter note…the Zen V I bought is a little 1 Gig one - but it’s currently holding over 16 hours of Audible content (8 hours of Part 2 of DeLillo’s Underworld, 6 hours of 100 Greatest Poems and 2 hours of In Bed With Susie Bright) plus about 8 playlists of music and various albums totaling about nine hours or so of music. I’m happy with that.
The iRiver T30 dashed my hope. I’ve struggled with it for two months and it just hasn’t been doing what I need. Since I have subscriptions to both Audible and Yahoo Music Engine, this has sucked. A lot. Basically, I’ve been paying for services that my hardware won’t let me use without being a massive pain in the ass.
So, I heard that Creative released their Zen V - an extremely small flash memory player that has a 128 x 128 pixel color screen and works with Audible and Yahoo Music Engine. The 1 Gig version meets all my needs and is a little over $100. Sure, I’ve believed that products will work before and had my little nerd heart broken. But…I want to believe.
The kids and I went down the Fry’s. Eventually, I found a bunch of the 1 Gig White / Orange Zen V so I bought one. First impression - the V is really small. It’s about the size of a Zippo lighter. Next impression - the packaging is evil, like so much packaging nowdays. Impossible to open plastic encasement…you taunt me so! Shane used his knife on it. Die packaging, die!
I will now cut to the chase - it works! It works great! I installed the software and it transferred music from Yahoo no problem, then I switched to Audible Manager and…it worked, too! Both, at once - exactly what I wanted. Plus it shows the album art from YME which is cool. Finally - and I’m really happy about this - playlists from Y! Music Unlimited transfer over, too! So, I can make a playlist on Yahoo, then select that list on the Zen V. That is so great.
Random notes. It powers from the USB - built in rechargable battery. Goodbye AAAs. The software seems fine but I used Yahoo and Audible so I won’t really use it. Can’t figure out how to set the clock. Screen is nice in low light.
I got the smallest, cheapest one and I have a LOT of audio on there. Hours and hours and hours between the music and the audiobooks. So I’m happy, finally - a player that meets my needs with the added bonus of a nice color screen and other goodies like Outlook sync and an alarm clock that I care less about but could be handy and neat.
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