
		Current entry Archive December 2001

Behind These Eyes - December 2001

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Sunday, 9 December

The cable modem has been down, again, for a little over a week. It's not as if I can't post diary entries when it's down--Mike has kept his dialup account, so we can do it via modem--it's just that using the internet via dialup seems like too much bother.

A week ago Thursday we had a notice through our door that Telewest was doing work in the area and that we might experience a complete loss of service, but that it would be kept as brief as possible. Indeed the cable modem was cycling through its status lights, failing, and starting over. But by Friday it still hadn't resumed normal operations so we had to begin the usual tech support saga. After much ado, this eventually resulted in having a technician come look at the modem and cabling, but the earliest they could send anyone was this Friday. The technician plugged his tester into our cabling and found that there was a seriously low signal coming in, and that it varied greatly. When it's too low, the cable modem can't establish or keep a connection. Eventually he traced the fault back to the cable equivalent of our POP; once he'd adjusted something there, the signal coming into the house was suddenly too strong and he had to plug in a little device to impede it a bit.

So, it may well be that we've had a low-ish signal strength since the beginning, and that depending on other conditions, this has occasionally led to it dipping low enough that it becomes unuseable. When the other conditions change, it may have fixed itself. If that's true, then this underlying problem may have been responsible for the extremely unreliable service we've had. I'd like very much to think that it is true, because if so we might actually have a few trouble-free weeks!

Anyway, while all that was going on, we got the Thing installed and have been having great fun with it ever since. The very first day, it played Detox on my way home from work, which was great fun. (Of course I could have just selected Detox myself--but it was much more fun that it randomly selected that particular one out of the great many it had available to it to choose from.) And no, I was very good and didn't bang my head whilst driving.

This week was a very full week; we had the Steve Vai show on Tuesday, and Devin Townsend on Thursday. The Devin show was in a tiny room at the student union at Manchester University--slightly smaller even than the club where I saw Iced Earth. It was great; when they came on, he asked if we were ready to rock "Strapping Young Lad style"; they didn't do much from Terria at all, almost the entire playlist was Strapping Young Lad including--Detox! Yaaaaaah! And it was the same drummer! I'm so impressed with the drummer. He's playing incredibly fast and precise stuff, yet he never looks like he's working any harder than Stevie Wonder. He just languidly reaches out and does whatever needs doing, without much fuss.

Sadly, I think Devin hated us; the crowd wasn't a very fun one. This may have been due to the opening bands; there were two, the first of which was rather catchy, but the second's material, although heavy, was all very slow-speed and bass-y, so it put everyone to sleep.

Steve Vai was, well, Steve Vai; lots of twiddling and generally impressive playing. Everyone was twiddly; they each got their own twiddly solo spot. It wasn't Mike Kennealy this year, which I would have liked, but he did have a very impressive bassist (Billy Sheehan).

Meanwhile, christmas here this weekend with Mike's family (as not all of them are coming to Florida). A good time was had by all, I think, but Mike has developed a cold overnight and was quite unwell this morning.

Created at 23:03

Saturday, 15 December

Right! We're off on holiday, starting tomorrow! Well, we don't fly to Florida until Monday, but because we now have to be three hours early for international flights, we have to leave for the airport at 7 AM, so we will be spending tomorrow night at Mike's mum's.

I haven't really had a proper chance to work up a good anticipation, what with the uncertainty around the passports, followed by the mad dash to have christmas here (and therefore having to buy christmas presents before then, and cleaning the house etc), and then getting this blasted cold. But let's see if a quick peek at the weather can do anything for that...

Oooh, hee-hee, it's not looking too bad. Starting Monday we have 82, 73, 74, 76, 78, 81, 76, and 76 for projected highs, and the lowest low is 54. The projected forecast is identical for every single day: Partly Cloudy. In Florida weather-speak, this normally means there will be a few clouds. (If they say Sunny, they mean sunny and nothing but.)

Palm trees, here we come!

Now, a few people have asked: What is the Thing?

I'm so glad you asked. Allow me to explain.

OK, so your car has a cassette player. Pretty cool. You can make tapes of any of your CDs, or even mix different CDs on a tape. But the cassettes are all over the car, you can never find the one you want, you look up from changing tapes and you've drifted two lanes while you weren't looking. Plus the tapes die quickly; they get baked in the summer and generally beat up. And come to mention it, having to make tapes from your CDs is kind of a pain.

All right, so you get a CD player. Now you're talking! You don't have to make tapes any more. But there are CDs all over the car, which isn't much improvement over the cassettes except that they don't wear out as easily. And you still have to take your life into your hands to change CDs. And the CDs can either be in the car or the house, not both, so it seems like they are never where you want them.

Well, fine. You get a CD changer. Even better! No more changing CDs while you drive. You preload CDs into the unit, probably in the trunk. But it seems like no matter what CDs you preload, they're never quite the ones you want. And sometimes you realise just a little too late, as you drive off, that your Beloved Significant Other drove the car last, and all the CDs are that awful stuff that, bless 'em, you can't imagine how they listen to.

Well o-kay, you get a hundred-and-fifty-CD jukebox, so there!

And then your car gets stolen.

Ow.

Enter the Thing.

The Thing takes you away from all of this. The Thing is like having a Twilight Zone radio station where the DJs never talk and there are no commercials. What they play is uncannily in tune with what you like--you never know what will come next, but there's a really good chance you'll like it. (You know how it is when you're listening to the radio, and they play something you like, you get all excited--even if you own that CD and never listen to it!) And if it plays something you like but don't especially feel like listening to right now, this station will magically skip ahead to the next track. And no matter how far you drive, it never goes out of reception.

The Thing is a hard-drive-based MP3 player for the car. Ours is a 30GB unit, which means it can hold the equivalent of something like five hundred average CDs. (And they make a 60GB unit...)

This is absolutely the best way of having music in the car that I have ever seen. Some reasons:

You can have your entire collection in the car, all at once, all the time (unless you're a really serious collector). Whatever whim strikes you, you have that CD with you.
You can organise your tracks however you like. But--this is the really important thing--you don't have to choose just one way to organise them. You can have as many ways as you like, at the same time. Any track can be in any number of playlists. Make one playlist for Rock, another for Classical. Make a single list that contains everything. Make a list of stuff you especially like. Make His and Hers lists, or how about a What We Can Both Stand list? Make a list of tracks suitable for when children are in the car. Make a list of christmas music. Make a list of Stuff to Perk Me Up After a Really Bad Day. Make a list of Stuff to Keep Me Awake When Tired. Anything! Everything!

This is the most powerful feature of the Thing. It's hard to appreciate just how easily flexible this is until you've tried it.
You can choose whether to play a playlist randomly or in order. (I like to play them randomly, hence the sense of a Twilight Zone radio station. You never know what will come next.) You can save the shuffle setting for a playlist so you don't have to keep re-setting it.
You can tell a group of tracks to be treated as a single entity when shuffling. This is handy for classical music; you can group the 3 parts of a concerto so they are played together in order, but still randomise play overall.
You don't have to risk your life to change CDs (although you can still get that adrenalin rush if you want, by changing playlists or other settings).
Because MP3s, properly ripped, include a tag containing the artist, track name, CD, genre, and year, all this information is available to the Thing. Unlike a car CD player, where you generally know that you're quite fond of track 3 and not a lot more, the Thing tells you everything about the currently playing track.
If none of your carefully-crafted playlists is just exactly what you want at the moment--say you get a sudden overwhelming urge to hear a particular artist--there's a quick and easy search feature that can narrow in on a particular track, artist or CD. The Thing uses the MP3 tags to match your search criteria.
As if all of these features weren't enough, the Thing has other cool bits thrown in just for fun, one of which is visualisations, which essentially amount to a screen saver that reacts to what's playing. There are quite a few to choose from, from a plain oscilloscope to hula hoops to surreal stuff. Of course this isn't much use to the driver, but can be fun for passengers.
If your car does get stolen, you haven't lost all your CDs too.

The Thing is officially called a Rio Car; you can read lots more about it at their web site.

For us, there's really only one downside to the Thing, which is that it's designed to install in the dash like any other "head unit", but is removable by design for anti-theft reasons. This is all very well and good, but having a removable unit means you always have to remove it, which is not particularly convenient. I'd prefer a trunk-mounted unit, with only the control panel on the dash. Another side effect of installing in the dash is that whatever you had in the dash already has to go, so you now have no amplifier. We therefore had to get a separate amplifier. I liked my old car CD player's method for handling this problem--it broadcast on a particular radio frequency, so your existing tuner could pick it up. But these are very minor quibbles in the scheme of things. I'm already thoroughly addicted to having a Thing in the car!

For anyone else but us, I can see another roadblock, which is the need to rip your CDs to MP3s. We already work that way; we almost never play our physical CDs. We rip them, put the MP3s into a single enormous playlist, and use Mike's Amplay to play them via the computer. So, we already had a stock of MP3s ready to download onto the Thing. People who hadn't already done this, i.e. nearly everyone, would have to do quite a lot of ripping. It's not as bad as it might sound, though; when Mike first introduced me to this way of working, I went through my CDs; it didn't take all that long. The trick is to be methodical from the start--especially making sure you get good information into the tags.

Every now and then, I reflect with some satisfaction on the fact that I live at the only time in the history of this entire planet that this has been possible. Just a hundred years ago, if you wanted to listen to music, it pretty much had to be performed live. Now I, just an ordinary person, have weeks of music at my fingertips.

Created at 23:06