Weather, tech problems & other stuff

We are running some bipolar weather here in Ohio. Yesterday we were in the upper 60s, it then dropped to the 30s today, and is going even further down over the weekend. God I hate this weather.

Curse you WiFi

Ok, when I first hooked up my WiFi I loved it. My router was in the office, I could wander around the house and plop down wherever and hookup to the internet. Well the honeymoon is over. Now, and I don't know why, I keep dropping the connection if I am in the living room. I tried some of the recommended solutions for Windows XP users, although none of them have worked. Since I can get a consistent connection in my bedroom my guess is there is some problem with the walls, or maybe some kind of interference from the furnance since everything worked over the winter. Best Buy has different atenae you can buy, and I am going to pick one up over the weekend if it will work with my router.

Apple confusion

I am not a Mac user, however I have always respected them. They seem to have their finger on the pulse of the home market and can make a fairly powerful machine that is user friendly AND has visual appeal.

At MacWorld I guess there were some environmental protestors about the poor design of the iPod, environmentally speaking. I am upset about this personally. Apple had there "think differently" campaign yet this is an example thinking like everyone else. I was seriously considering an iPod, but I may have to consider one of their competitors, even though they cost more and do less. It really sucks because the integration with iTunes and the iTunes SDK (and I would guess there is an iPod SDK as well).

Now the bit of interesting info out of Mac World, at least to me. It is also I think the least understood. Apple announced the new iPod Shuffle. Just about everyone I have read or heard talking about this seems to think this is a bone head move on Apple's part, saying that for the same price (or pretty close) you can pick up a comparable iRiver that does more. When I was looking at iRiver's page (which, BTW, I own an older iRiver and love their products) if you compared strictly on memory capacity iRiver was $100 more.

Granted the iRiver's do more, however having had an iRiver that has a voice recorder, inline MP3 recorder and FM tuner I can say I have yet to use any of these features. I have to ask how many people actually use these features anyways? Really. I know few people who use voice recorders, and much like other things I have seen these in cell phones. Given that the purpose of an mp3 player is to play music, the FM tuner is probably not going to see much use. With podcasting I would guess that the use of the recorder is more likely, but I would guess that anyone with an interest in podcasting will probably have an iPod.

However, I think everyone misses the point of the Shuffle. This is a small device that does 1 thing well (hopefully well) - play MP3 files. It strips out all the crap functions that most people will either not use or already have setup in other devices and just plays files. Frankly the Shuffle sounds a lot like how I use my current player. Volume control, skip to the next/previous song. I rarely check the display for what is playing. I do play my songs in order, which is an option on the Shuffle, however I can see where the random shuffle (which is an option on mine as well) is a good thing to keep things fresh.

With this kind of device, at least in my experience, you just load up with music and listen to it until you are tired of the current mix and then you load it up again. Having used a similar device and loaded some podcasts and the little display window on them is not any more conducive to podcasts than having no window. And frankly when I load podcasts I load them in the order I want to listen to them in.

I think it was 6 months to a year ago that I read an article where the author felt that the market for music player would break into 2 categories - cheap low end memory based devices and the juke box devices a la the iPod. The key word for memory based devices is cheap. I think $149 for a 1 gig device is probably about right, although it would be cool to get it down to about $100. A swappable battery would also be good.