A Few Random Thoughts

It has been awhile since I last posted and thought I would throw out a few random things.

R. I. P Nomad Jukebox. My Creative Nomad Jukebox up and died on me. I loved this MP3 player because it felt sturdy in my hands, held a metric butt load of music & podcasts and let me play everything back at 1.5 speed. The music still appears to be there, but none of the meta data is there so I have no real idea what I am listening to. The biggest issue is when plugged into my computer it is not acknowledged as an MP3 player anymore. I tried both a standard reset & hard reset with no luck. That leaves me with my iPod Touch, which I am not very happy with. I did find a way to get my podcasts to play back faster, but there does not seem to be an automated way. So every time I get new podcasts I need to manually mark them as audio books. Arg! Better than nothing.

Keeping my brain from turning to mush. I have to admit it would be too easy to just veg out and watch TV all day between sending out resumes. Fortunately I have a couple of programming projects that keep me off the streets & not in front of the TV. The first was my Geoaching Trackable Keeper. Hey, I'm a coder not a marketer. It helps me pick up my geocoins after I drop them at an event. It also helps with discovering coins that I see at events but I am not moving along. I might be sharing this one with a couple of local coin hounds so I need to clean it up. More on that later. I also have an email program I want to work on to help when I send out emails for For Purpose, Inc. That has run into some snags. I also have an idea to generate a field note file for geocaching to help log temporary caches at events. None of these are glamorous programs, but they help me to work in C# and explore parts of the .Net framework. I still have some ideas for creating something long the lines of Eva. I like the idea, but I think my version would revolve around things like sending a tweet or getting something on my shopping list. If nothing else I will be kicking the tires of some APIs while trying to get the program up and running.

House & Lawn Care. I have been working on knocking out some projects here at home while I have a chance. With summer coming the lawn will start to take priority, along with some outside projects. I want to fertilize this year. I am not sure the lawn has ever been fertilized and it is starting to show it. I will probably not be able to swing the stuff I want to use, but it needs something. One other outdoor project I should be able to get done regardless of my employment status is a new address sign for the front. The one my brother made for mom years ago is showing its age. I would love to get the house painted and a couple of windows replaced, but those things can wait if need be. Inside I already have the programmable thermostat, I just need to set it up. The bathroom will be getting some TLC next. Mostly little stuff with little cost involved.

Walking. I am having some problems getting going. The Spree For All showed me I am not as ready as I thought. The bigger issue is still getting the routine established, which is going tougher than I thought. Mostly it is mental - since I am still building my endurance back up I am not walking for a long period of time. So it feels like a waste when I head to the gym on a bad day and walk for 10, maybe 15 minutes. Once I get past this hurdle and I am walking for longer than it takes to go to/from the gym things will be better. To just get to that point.

iPod. I am still liking it for the PDA type stuff. I need to find a better calendar program for the desktop. Google Calendar is great, but not convenient when working with geocaching.com. Maybe I need to dig a little further in getting that info to automatically flow to Google Calendar. Battery life seems ok, although it seems to go from 'no problem' to 'charge me now' with little notice. On a road trip yesterday I played music for 3 hours (1.5 hours each way) and the power indicator did not move. Today after not playing anything and being in & out doing PDA things it is down to half mast. Weird. I am glad I had it yesterday though. I did not write down the address of where I was going (thought it was there) so I had to steal borrow some wifi to get the address.