Tag Archives: zune - Page 2

Not thinking ahead

Posted by on March 8, 2008 1 comment
I was disappointed in the quality of my MP3s (128/192k), so I decided to re-rip everything into WMA lossless. It’s taken a full week, but now I’m done. But now my collection is 130 gigs. I knew I’d have to swap out the hard drive in my Zune, but I was planning on a 100 gig replacement.

I am not going through the ripping process again. I guess I’m going to have to be satisfied with a partial library on the Zune until 200 gig drives become available.

Distributed stupidity

Posted by on March 7, 2008 No comments
I recently decided I would put my Zune tag on my Live Spaces page. I used the HTML Sandbox gadget to place the HTML on the page. In IE, all is good. In Opera, it wouldn’t show up.

First thing I checked was my Allow Plug-ins settings for the site. I leave it off by default because Flash is just too overused by ads anymore. It was off, so I turned it on. Still nothing.

Then I started looking at the HTML source of the page. The HTML sandbox uses an IFRAME. Hmmm. So I right click the place for my Zune tag and choose Frame>Open in new tab. Its address is not spaces.live.com, it’s start.com. I don’t have anything in Opera saying it’s ok to have plug-ins for start.com. So I add the entry for start.com and allow plug-ins. Now my tag shows up.

Because everything is so distributed anymore, it takes a lot of investigative work to discover why things don’t work. It’s no wonder that so many people can’t run in a more protected mode – like in my case, disabling all plug-ins by default – because to have any decent usability, you have to have so much technical understanding about how to troubleshoot isolated issues.

Who’s Zuning who?

Posted by on March 2, 2008 No comments
It has bugged me for quite a while that there is no readily available Zune merchandise.  I don’t mean like accessories or other dreck, I mean like shirts, hats, stickers.  There’s no way for a proud Zune owner to show they support that product. 
 
Microsoft has a small, strong, loyal following – it echoes of early Apple – and they are not giving these people the proper tools to evangelize the product.  It’s really a sub-culture, never getting enough press to excite anyone that isn’t in the culture already.
 
A perfect example: Christmas 2007.  I saw week after week of Best Buy, Staples, and Circuit City ads roll out with mentioning of Apple and Sansa products, but not a single mention of Zune.  You’d think it didn’t exist.  It was a terrible feeling.  Now I know you don’t get placed in those circulars without concessions, so maybe Microsoft wasn’t ready to pay for play yet.
 
Back to my original point.  The Zune has a clever name and a colorful, creative logo.  I could see these tastefully embroidered on a black polo shirt.  I could see a large Zune logo silkscreened on the back of a tee shirt, or embroidered on a baseball cap.  I could imagine stickers in the rear windows of cars, and since I am MS certified, I could easily imagine the name/logo on anything in the MS company store – like other MS brands like XBox.  I did request Zune merchandise from the MCP store and asked to be notified if any became available.  We’ll see.
 
We’re trying, Microsoft.  Let us help.

Crap on

Posted by on February 29, 2008 No comments
Thanks Mark for turning me on to Woot… maybe.
 
I just got my second Bag of Crap today.  For those not in the Woot culture, the Bag of Crap (or BOC) is buying random products for a buck.  The great majority of people get stuff that lives up to the product name: crap.  Not literally, but crappy items.  Some people get good stuff.  So it’s a lottery and you get what you get and that’s that.
 
One of the fun aspects of the BOC is the mad rush to get it.  There’s usually less than 5000 of them and you have a constantly-growing audience waiting for this item to appear.  When it does, it’s like Cabbage Patch Doll Christmas.  A Black Friday of Internet proportions.  This product usually marks the end of another Woot culture phenom: the Woot-off.  I’ve always likened the Woot-off to a rock concert, where everyone gets all built up then the band plays their huge hit and the crowd goes wild, rushes the stage, and trashes everything.  Such is the Woot-off, with product after product building up the audience and finally the BOC comes on and the fans rush the servers, taking them down in seconds.
 
So the first BOC I did ok, with an RCA Lyra 20GB MP3 player.  Not that I’d ever use it, but it would be the ultimate embarrassment present for a teen relative:
 
Here’s that MP3 player you’ve been asking for.  It’s not an Apple, but RCA is a good brand; they’ve been around longer than Apple.  I hope you enjoy it.
 
To illustrate the magnitude of uncool it would be…
image
That’s the Lyra next to my Zune.
 
But back to the point, this recent BOC was crap.  One of the items was a broken RC car, returned to whatever dollar store it came from as defective.  But I showed them.  I opened that plastic crap up, glued the broken pieces back together and now I have a piece of crap RC car.  That’s the game.  Sometimes you win, sometimes you have to make do with what you get.

Me and the World

Posted by on February 27, 2008 No comments
I’ve been on a pretty big Belinda Carlisle kick lately.  I was on Zune.net checking out my profile and was surprised that I was the 2nd-highest player of that artist and not far off from the #1 spot.  The funny part that struck me was that my second most played artist was Rancid.  Now how does a record company market to someone like that?  "If you love Belinda Carlisle, you’ll really love the new Rancid album."
image
 
Browsing around some other related artists I saw someone whose top artist was the Go Go’s and their second artist was Metallica, So I’m not alone in that weirdness.
I heard on the news that another airline is going to be charging extra for baggage.  At first I was angry, thinking that the airlines are just tacking on fees for nothing.  I mean, they have the space available for baggage, why charge extra to use it.  Then I thought, well, if they reduce the amount of baggage, they lower the weight of the plane and should save on fuel.
 
So, if their prime objective is to reduce weight to save fuel, why not charge ticket prices based on the weight of you and your baggage?  A dollar a pound, or more accurately, just have an exchange rate.  Over holidays, ticket prices are $1.20/lb, during midweek, $.80/lb.  That could motivate people to lose weight and/or be more conservative in what they pack.  It also gives people the power to control their own prices. 
 
Finally, another commercial observation.  This one is a radio commercial for Mercedes Benz where they have customers giving testimonials.  This guy is going on about the service he gets from his dealer and how they sell him a new car about bi-annually.  Then he makes some inane comment about the reliability of MB.  Personally, I don’t expect any car to fail within two years before I trade it in, so I guess he’s got a pretty low expectation of quality.  Another female customer in the commercial sums up the MB attitude in one line: "You don’t get cappuccino at the Honda dealership."  I should send her a Starbucks gift card.