Day 5 or the Hell Week
vacation started off well. We managed to get up and moving in time to join the rest of the riders, however, most of them decided to ride the C
ride today. Just our luck. We did get to ride with many of the other Hell Week
riders, which was a nice change. Also, the famed Texas wind got it’s dander up a bit. The ride was a sixty-something miler which was shaped as a skinny loop
meaning that it wasn’t quite an out and back, but it wasn’t really much of a loop either.
We rolled out in a big group, but that quickly devolved into smaller groups and eventually turned into groups of two to four. Sascha and I, of course, stayed together; and Annie, Nate, and another Minneapolis rider rode together some of the way. There was a stout headwind on perhaps a quarter of the ride on the way out. The turn around point was a convenience store to the west of Fredericksburg where we hung out for a bit, caught out breath, and grabbed a bite or two.
On the way back we were rewarded with several segments of tail wind, some of which were downhill. There was a short gravelish
segment and a couple of segments on 290 which isn’t the best riding road. The last six or so miles were directly into the teeth of a headwind and mostly uphill. It was a tough finish, but a nice ride overall.
I am currently sitting in the Java Ranch
coffee shop. It happens to be closed, and there are people walking up and trying the door about every five minutes. Their wireless is also on the fritz, so I am typing this into Oxygen which is a good plan anyway.
The iPod Story
Knowing that we had several hours to kill on the way down, the plan was to fill my old Creative Zen Jukebox with our collective musical stylings. Everything was going according to plan, within some loose definition of the idea according to plan
when we hit the first problem. The library was bigger then the size of the player. So, I set to down sampling all the tracks that were ripped at bit rates greater then 128 down to 128. As you can imagine, this takes some time. I started the process on wednesday morning and just let it run. When I got home later that evening, it was in the I
titles.
Knowing that we were running out of clock time, I decided to proceed with aggressive de-duplication at this point. Starting with Z
I proceeded to delete many files. I deleted whole genres or music. The player was only 30GB, and we were still sitting in the 32 GB range when I decided to hang it up for the night. It was nearing 2AM and I still had to copy all the music to the player itself. So, I fired up the software and started to copy. The software quickly indexed all the songs, then paused… and I waited… and waited… and waited.. Then it politely told me that one track was copied at the rate of 1.8KB per second. Obviously, that wasn’t going to get the job done. The van was supposed to depart at 8AM,and that was about six hours away.
I messed with the setting, played with the drivers and the software version, and purchased a replacement software application all for nothing. Finally, I decided to go to sleep and allow the copy to move as much as it could. It made it through about 800 songs. So, I thought there was going to be a limited selection of music for the first day. Later when I was looking at the play list, it turns out that the tracks weren’t even visible from the software on the player. I believe this may be caused by the replacement software skipping some kind of update step in order to copy the files faster. The final result was that we had about 60 tracks on the player. So, we went and bought iPods.
I would like to personally thank Creative for making such a crappy product, but I’ll rant about that sometime soon!
Tags: Creative Zen, Hell Week, iPod, iTunes, MP3 players, Texas
