Stories on a Schedule

I’m a big fan of stories. I like to hear them. I like to tell them. Heck, most of my favorite posts on this blog have been stories. Anyway, Bike Action Dave pointed me toward The Moth Podcast, which is all about stories. They have lots of people get up and tell stories, and they put them out in podcasts. Somtimes, they’re from writers or other pseudo-famous people. Sometimes they’re from random people who just tell a good story. Sometimes they’re sad. Sometimes they’re happy. Sometimes they’re funny. Sometimes you win. Sometimes you lose. Sometimes it rains.

Anyhoo, if you dig the stories, and you like podcasts, check it out. It comes out once a week, and I typically wish it was more frequent. They generally take about 15 minutes, which is about commute-sized for me.

Timing is Everything

Wouldn't you know it? Just two days after I ordered a new AbsPod, Apple goes and updates the line, now offering a 32GB version of the iPod Touch. The bitch of it is that my new toy has already shipped. Just administratively, though. It is apparently scheduled to be exported from China within a couple of days. One of the things I didn't like about the 16GB of the touch is that I would have to actively manage my media on there because I have more than 16GB of music. 32GB would mean I probably wouldn't have to do that, or at least I wouldn't have to very much. I suppose I could cancel my order and upgrade, or return it, or something like that. However, I'm not positive that I want to pay another $100. Probably not. Still, it would have been better for me if they had announced this last Tuesday. Very inconsiderate of his Steveness.

Luck Runs Out

No, I'm not talking about the Patriots' almost perfect season here. I wouldn't use the word "luck" in any way when talking about their season. (If I were going to talk about that, the title would probably have been "Cheaters Don't Always Win.") What I am talking about is the AbsPod. Almost a year ago, I wrote a couple of posts about leaving my iPod on an airplane. While it seemed pretty bad at first, I ended up lucky, getting the AbsPod back just one day later, after it had made a nice little round trip jaunt to Grand Rapids, MI.

Well, I wasn't so lucky this weekend. I was talking with the BHK when I arrived home after golf (yes, golf!) Saturday, and I had a few too many things going on as I opened the door to enter the house. As a result, the AbsPod fell right out of my hands. I've dropped the thing several times before, but I typically manage to get a foot under it to cushion the blow or something. Not so much this time. It fell straight down and landed flat on its back on the concrete floor of the garage with a sickening smack. I was bummed about it, but I had other things going on, and I quickly stopped thinking about it.

Sunday morning, I grabbed my standard five things (keys, gym ID card, bottle of water, towel, and AbsPod) and went to the gym, not thinking at all about the stomach-turning smack from the day before. As I started into my work out, I fired up the AbsPod to listen to something, and it did it's normal turning on things, then presented me with a cartoon-ized picture of an iPod with a frowny face, along with this message: "www.apple.com/ipod/support." DOH! I messed with it for a while, but listening to it closely revealed that the hard drive was making lots of clicks and grinding noises, which told me that the hard drive was toast.

I guess I shouldn't be too bummed out about it. I could decide that I've been using it on borrowed time for the last 11 months. I could possibly fix it by cracking it open and digging into the actual iPod molecules and replacing the hard drive, and I probably will. But that's not a for-sure thing. That's just the engineer in me talking. In the more immediate future, I ordered an iPod touch to replace it. The upside of that is that it has no hard drive to ruin.

It's not all bad. For a little anguish and a lot of money, I get a new toy to play with. Still, I hope your weekend was luckier than mine.

Super Useful / Cool Orienteering Tip

I just ran across this tip for using your watch as a compass over on Lifehacker, and I thought it was just neato. I thought it was the sort of thing MacGyver might make use of when he was lost in the woods. But thinking about it made me wonder just how useful the tip was.

First of all, you get into the whole "this tip is opposite if you're in the southern hemisphere" thing. Not really a big deal, since I'm pretty much never in that half of the world, and I kind of expected it, having learned at a strangely young age that clocks only go clockwise because they are built to mimic sundials and were developed in the northern hemisphere. Had they been created south of the equator, they would go counter-clockwise. Or, I guess, they would still go clockwise because saying that a clock goes counter-clockwise in normal operation would be stupid, but clockwise would be the opposite of what it is now. ANYway, ruminations aside, I'm thinking that the hemisphere caveat makes the tip a little more complex, and tips ought to be simple in order to be memorable and, thus, useful.

Even more complex is that you're supposed to subtract an hour if you're in daylight savings time. Originally hailing from Indiana, where they absolutely ignored daylight savings time until a year ago (I always thought that TV stations just moved their schedules up for the warm part of the year), since I moved to the land of changing clocks, I have always had to be told when daylight savings time started and ended because I just never had a good grasp of those dates. Then, last year, They went and changed the dates on me just as I was starting to get an idea of when to expect them. So I'm all sorts of confused, and that doesn't help me make use of this tip.

I'm imagining being lost in the woods somewhere, wondering which way is North, finding a clearing (so I can see the sun ... duh), pulling my watch off and orienting it with the 12 to the left, aligning the hour hand with the sun, and thinking ... lessee, it's March 2nd ... has daylight savings started yet ... dammit! I don't know! How can I find which way is South, so that I can then deduce which way is North?!

And what if I happened to be in the southern hemisphere? Do they even use daylight savings time down there? And, if so, do they do it opposite of when we do? How can I possibly figure all this out?!

Of course, that example is ridiculous, in that there is no way I'd be anywhere near the woods on March 2nd because it's difficult to watch absurd amounts of college hoops from the woods. But let's not focus on that right now.

Still, maybe this whole discussion is moot because my cell phone has become a modern day pocket watch, and my wristwatch has been sitting in the console of my car for 2 years wanting a new battery and a better clasp on its band. (Strangely, it has not managed to procure those things from the console of my car, even though it has had two years to do so. I thought putting it there might make it get out and help itself if I ever ventured near a mall. That was not so smart, though, because how can it possibly get out and help itself when its battery is dead?) Sure, I could go to the car and pull out my watch, then go through the placing, orienting, and kvetching, but if I'm at the car anyway, I might as well just turn it on and look at the nav system. That's why I bought the damned thing. (Fine, I bought it because it's a cool gadget, and I like cool gadgets, but I did think it might be useful if I ever wanted to know which direction was North.)

So while this tip may be neato, I'm thinking it's not particularly useful to me, except for breaking my writer's block. Namaste!

My Kind of Town

I often wonder what's going to be on TV on any given night, or what channel a game I want to watch will be on, or whether The Office is new this week. I usually wonder these things when I'm not in front of my TV. That doesn't really matter all that much, though, as my cable company DVR isn't particularly adept at speedily answering those questions for me. So, as is my wont, I turn to these internets for some good and speedy info. But I have rarely been satisfied with the solutions there. Sites that will show me stuff are all the time requiring me to refresh the page to go to a new day, then a new time, then a new page of channels. Then, to see more than just the title of a show, I have to battle with their weird show info pop-over to get the full dilly. It irks me. I don't want to go through several pages. I want to see the info NOW. I am petulant about this, and I realize that's not a good thing. Still, I am gratified by the new-to-me Beta of Couchville. With it, you can quickly jump to a day on the calendar, or a channel, or the current time. But more impressively, you can move up and down the channel list or forward and backward in time just by dragging the grid in your browser. It's simple, clean, and it's marvelous. I love it.

Besides, how can I not love a place called Couchville? I feel like I live there already.