Now I Know That The Universe Reads Threshold

Remember last night when I was writing about my imaginary island, the one on which I wouldn’t have to deal with traffic?
Well, the Universe remembered it this morning and said, “Oh, so you don’t like traffic, huh? How do you like this, bitch?” and proceeded to hit me with some of the most irritating traffic ever.
It wasn’t that there was that much traffic. In fact, I would say there were fewer cars than you’d expect out on the road.
But despite that, the traffic just refused to move, and there was no apparent cause that I could see.
The most irritating thing was that the biggest slowdowns occurred just before my exits, so I found myself in the “so close, yet so far away” situation as I was within sight of my exit but was slowed to a crawl or a complete stop.
On 7 I would expect this sort of thing, but on the toll road? Apart from the occasional backed-up exit on a Friday night I’ve never seen traffic do anything but flow smoothly there.
It was pretty irritating.
Once I got to the meeting my spirits were lifted slightly by learning that one of the speakers scheduled wouldn’t be making it, and we were going to not bother filling the void and leave early.
My spirits sagged, though, as I sat and listened to really boring presentations that had nothing to do with me given by some of the least dynamic speakers in the world.
Still, by the first break we were over a half an hour ahead of schedule.
Then the most boring guy ever got up to talk. And talk. And talk.
And then, as if they weren’t bored enough, people started asking questions. Why would you do that to yourself and your co-workers?
End result? We not only lost the half an hour we had gained but actually ended up being five minutes behind schedule.
I decided that I just couldn’t take any more at lunch time and ducked out of there. It just wouldn’t have been worth the additional overtime to stay for the whole thing.
When I got home my Nano was waiting for me, so I began playing around with that.
So far it really hasn’t “wowed” me. It performs its function, and it should be fine for what I intend to use it for, but I really don’t like having to use iTunes. I wish it worked more like my other MP3 player, which just shows up as an external drive once it’s plugged in so all I have to do is drag and drop the MP3 files over. Done.
Not so with the Nano.
I have to go into iTunes and create a library. From there I can choose to have it automatically move files over to the Nano, or I can do it manually. There are disadvantages to both methods. Manually is more like what I’m used to, though I still have to do it inside the iTunes GUI rather than just in Windows. However, if I do it that way I always have to remember to manually “eject” the Nano from iTunes when I want to disconnect it.
If I go with the automated method, it will first try to put every MP3 in the library onto the Nano, but it’s not able to that as my library of MP3s is 10 GBs more than the Nano’s capacity, so iTunes will then ask if I want it to just put a random sampling of MP3s onto the Nano.
I like having a little more control over what goes onto it, though, so that doesn’t work for me. Ultimately, I had to go through the library and remove everything except for 2 GB (actually, 1.82 GB) worth of songs that I wanted to move over to the Nano, allowing me to make use of the automatic updating.
Still, it should adequately serve its intended purpose now that I’ve essentially got it the way I want it.
Getting used to the controls took a little bit, but I’ve pretty much got the hang of it.
I don’t like the fact that you can’t actually “Stop” a song; you can only pause it. Not a big deal, and I can see the usefulness of it (If you shut it off and then turn it back on and hit Play it will just pick up where it left off. If you want to play something else, just navigate to a different song.), but it’s just representative of the odd way (from my perspective) that Apple does some things (QuickTime is similarly sans a “Stop” button).
Of course, the one advantage of going the iPod route is that there are so many third-party products made specifically for the iPod family.
One of those is the iPod Alarm Clock, which I actually picked up today.
I would have liked to have gotten a black one to match the Nano, but Best Buy didn’t have any in stock and I didn’t feel like sending away for one, so I went with the white.
After yesterday’s experience I vowed to never be woken by talk radio again, and since my old CD Clock Radio can’t manage to play CDs for the alarm anymore, I felt this was worth it.
In any case, it’s nearly time for me to wrap things up for the day.