Chris​Hubbs​.com

An original user of Google Reader, some months ago when NewsGator decided to make its products free I decided to switch over and give them a try.  I’ve been using Feed Demon for a while now and have been more or less happy with it.

The scary part about switching to a new feed reader for me is establishing a level of trust in it.  The Most Important Thing that a feed reader has to do is to get me all the content.  It can’t miss posts.  It can’t drop ’em.  If it got posted on a feed I’m subscribed to, it better show up.   And a couple of weeks ago I started getting suspicious of Feed Demon.   I’m subscribed to Andy Osenga’s blog feed and his comment feed, and comments started coming through for posts I hadn’t yet read.  The blog feed looked OK in Feed Demon, it just wasn’t updating.  Strange.  I unsubscribed and re-subscribed to the feed and then it all seemed to work OK again.

Fast-forward to today.  I was reading through comments from Geof Morris’ blog and realized…  I’ve never read that blog post.  I went over to ijsm.org and found out that I’ve missed at least 10 days worth of posts from Geof. Not good. Not good at all.

Feed Demon has a version 2.6.1 Beta available, and I might just give it a try… but for now I think I’m going to return to my trusty friend Google Reader. I exported OPML from Feed Demon, imported it back into Reader, and everything worked very nicely. It imported my 400-feed OPML file without a hiccup and managed to recognize duplicate subscriptions and not double-subscribe me. Time to give it another go.

In theory I still really like the idea of Feed Demon, what with it allowing local applications on multiple PCs to sync to the same online account, and allow web-based access, too. I’m also happy to have a non-Google alternative. (While I’m not a Google hater, keeping all the eggs from the same basket always seems like a good idea.) But if I can’t trust my feed-reader, well, sorry, it failed Most Important Thing #1.

OK, rarely will I write a full post to recommend someone else’s post, but the latest from software-manager-par-excellance Rands is just too good to pass up. He has me nailed. In his latest post, Rands lists off his “Nerd Handbook”. Becky had only to read the first two sentences and she was chuckling in the knowledge that this guy was describing me:

A nerd needs a project because a nerd builds stuff. All the time. Those lulls in the conversation over dinner? That’s the nerd working on his project in his head.

Guilty as charged.

A few other priceless bits:

Understand your nerd’s relation to the computer. It’s clichéd, but a nerd is defined by his computer, and you need to understand why.

First, a majority of the folks on the planet either have no idea how a computer works or they look at it and think “it’s magic”. Nerds know how a computer works. They intimately know how a computer works. When you ask a nerd, “When I click this, it takes awhile for the thing to show up. Do you know what’s wrong?” they know what’s wrong. A nerd has a mental model of the hardware and the software in his head. While the rest of the world sees magic, your nerd knows how the magic works, he knows the magic is a long series of ones and zeros moving across your screen with impressive speed, and he knows how to make those bits move faster.

Yep, that’s me.

Your nerd lives in a monospaced typeface world. Whereas everyone else is traipsing around picking dazzling fonts to describe their world, your nerd has carefully selected a monospace typeface, which he avidly uses to manipulate the world deftly via a command line interface while the rest fumble around with a mouse.

The reason for this typeface selection is, of course, practicality. Monospace typefaces have a knowable width. Ten letters on one line are same width as ten other letters, which puts the world into a pleasant grid construction where X and Y mean something.

Ah, monospaced font, how I love thee.

Humor is an intellectual puzzle, “How can this particular set of esoteric trivia be constructed to maximize hilarity as quickly as possible?” Your nerd listens hard to recognize humor potential and when he hears it, he furiously scours his mind to find relevant content from his experience so he can get the funny out as quickly as possible.

Got me again.

And the most painful:

Your nerd has built an annoyingly efficient relevancy engine in his head. It’s the end of the day and you and your nerd are hanging out on the couch. The TV is off. There isn’t a computer anywhere nearby and you’re giving your nerd the daily debrief. “Spent an hour at the post office trying to ship that package to your mom, and then I went down to that bistro — you know — the one next the flower shop, and it’s closed. Can you believe that?”

And your nerd says, “Cool”.

Cool? What’s cool? The business closing? The package? How is any of it cool? None of it’s cool. Actually, all of it might be cool, but your nerd doesn’t believe any of what you’re saying is relevant. This is what he heard, “Spent an hour at the post office blah blah blah…”

Cool. I mean, ouch.

There is a lot of good stuff that I didn’t quote here, so if you really want to get an insight into me, yeah, go read the article. For my sensitive readers, yeah, there are a couple bad words in the post. Ignore them. Read the rest of it. Well worth it.

After running the numbers and looking at likely use scenarios over the upcoming year or two, we finally decided to switch our cell phone service from US Cellular, our provider of the past seven years, to Verizon. Their plans are fairly similar, but when it came down to it, the employer discount that Verizon offers was enough to sway the balance in their direction.

So last night Becky and I had a couple hours while the girls were at a friend’s house, and we headed to the local Verizon establishment to get things set up. We had researched phones already, so it was just a matter of getting the phones and setting up the service. Some observations:

Good things:

Welcome/Service: Verizon gave a very good first impression. The manager greeted us as we entered the store, asked a few questions to find out how he could help, then took our names, double-checked that our existing phone numbers were portable (they are), and answered a couple questions while waiting for a member of the sales staff to get free. Well done, sir.

Ease of signup: We made this pretty easy because I already knew exactly what plan I wanted. I told the sales guy that we wanted that plan and those phones, and he pretty much took care of the rest. He was able to scan the bar code on my Iowa driver’s license to get all that pertinent info (no possibility of transcription errors!); the only thing I had to give him was my SSN and my email addresses (work email to qualify for the employee discount, home email for account correspondence).

Not-so-good things:

Phone availability: Our salesman went to the back to grab the phones we wanted and seemed to take a while. Finally he came back empty-handed and asked his co-worker if they were, in fact, out of the Nokia phones that we were looking for. His co-worker’s response: “I haven’t seen any of those in a long time.” Not an exceptionally heartening reply. However, Verizon will Fedex us the phones for free and we can activate them once they are delivered. While this didn’t allay the disappointment of not being able to walk out with a new phone, it’s at least a reasonable solution, and we’re getting good phones at a good price.

Communication: A couple of things here. First off, while it was clear I was getting some sort of employee discount on the service, it wasn’t clear that I was getting a similar discount on the phones. The phones that we were getting were listed on the placard as $80 with a $50 mail-in rebate. However, when they were rung up for sale, I was only charged $20 each; no rebate necessary. While I’m not complaining about the lower price, had I known that I was receiving a 30% discount on the phones themselves, I would likely have considered buying a slightly more expensive phone. But I’m happy with the one I’m getting, so that’s mostly their loss of a sale.

Second thing: I never once saw a piece of paper with the cell contract, details, or my contact information on it. I found this to be a bit odd. In past signups with US Cellular, I had to sign multiple copies of a contract, verify that all my information was correct, etc. This time: nothing. Now I know there’s a 30-day money-back period where I can go change things if they really messed something up, it would’ve been more comforting had I at least been given a one-page printout summarizing my purchase; something for me to verify that they got my name and email in the system correctly, that they had signed me up for what I wanted, basically just a receipt of sorts.

Which leads to the third issue - my email addresses. I had to dictate the email addresses to the salesman. He got the work email address correct; I had that email waiting for me this morning. But I have yet to receive an email to my home address; I was supposed to get one welcoming me to Verizon, giving links to log into the Verizon customer website, etc. I can only imagine that the sales guy transcribed it wrong, and of course, I had no way to verify it. (See above.) For future reference, how would you dictate ‘chris.hubbs’ as part of an email address? I said “chris dot hubbs” and assumed it was obvious, but I have a bad feeling that there’s an email floating around in cyberspace this morning looking for the ‘chrisdothubbs’ email address. :-(

Conclusion: I guess I’ll have to wait until we get the phones here later in the week to make a final decision. (Oh, another thing that would’ve been nice: a Fedex tracking number for the phones. Probably also emailed to chrisdothubbs.) Overall, it was a pretty good, easy experience last night; a one-page confirmation sheet, though, would’ve taken it from “pretty good” to “excellent”.

I’ve carried a PDA pretty much everywhere with me for the past several years; I think I’ve been through three different Palm models. My current one is a Palm Tungsten E2. I don’t use too many features on it, really; my primary uses are the calendar and a few games. The calendar is the biggie for me - I need something to keep all my work meetings and outside meetings lined up. The past few weeks my PDA has had trouble holding a charge. It doesn’t matter whether I charge it via USB or from the wall charger; within 10 minutes or so it complains about the battery being low and starts disabling functions. I’m assuming it’s nearing the end of its life - I’ve had it just over two years now.

Second upcoming event: our cell phone contract is just about up. I haven’t completely decided yet, but I’m thinking we’ll abandon US Cellular in favor of Verizon, for a number of reasons. With the new contract comes the opportunity to purchase a new phone at a reduced price. So I have a convergence here which might allow me to start consolidating electronic gadgetry. So I want to explore my options.

Desired operations:

• Basic cell phone operation
• A usable calendar that allows for easy entry and reference. My employer uses an antiquated Lotus Notes system for email and calendar, so I’m not counting on the ability to sync things up.

Heck, I think that’s basically it. So what are my options?

Geof was the first to respond to my tweet on this topic. His words: “this is God’s way of getting you to buy an iPhone.” Geof was an iPhone early-adopter and has had nothing but good to say about it. And I will admit that I’ve drooled over the iPhone a time or two. Who can’t love its wonderful touch-screen interface and Apple styling?

I have a few issues with the iPhone option, though. I’m not crazy about the price, but hey, if I’m replacing a PDA, the iPhone isn’t really any more expensive. Does the iPhone even have a calendar feature? Surely it must. But I don’t really want to use it to replace my iPod - I want my iPod to be able to hold my entire music collection, and they don’t make a 40 GB iPhone yet. :-)

The other issue, which will be an issue for all web-enabled phones, is that I don’t really need full connectivity all the time. Goodness knows I check my email often enough as it is, I certainly don’t need another way that I can be distracted. And the data plans that come hand-in-hand with these smartphones end up adding $30 - $40 per month to your cell plan. For the type of plan we’d have, that’s almost a 50% increase, which is too much.

There are other cell/PDA combos out there; you can get a Palm Treo, any one of several models of Blackberry, and some “smartphones” that the cell providers offer. But again, I don’t want/need the data plan. I just want something that’ll give me phone capability and help keep me organized.

So what’s a guy to do?

Yesterday SimpleHelp.net posted 10 Alternatives to iTunes for managing your iPod. (They have since been dugg and their website is down. Bummer. You can still see the guts of the article from the Google cache.)

At my work location iTunes is verboten, so I’m all for exploring other ways to manage my iPod, or at least to play the tunes off of it while I’m at work. Here are my basic requirements:

• It needs to run smoothly. (Duh.)
• It needs to be Windows-based. (No Macs or Linux boxes here.)
• It needs to support the AAC audio format. I’ve got a bunch of .m4c files on my iPod.
• It shouldn’t be a system hog.

Nice to have’s would include portability, support for Last.FM and the ability to copy songs off the iPod back to the PC.

There are 5 alternatives on the SimpleHelp site that are available for the Windows platform. Here are my reviews of them:

Floola

This was the first one, and at first glance was a strong contender. It has support for Last.FM, is portable, and has a pretty nice UI. Once I got it installed, though, I found some issues. Even though it appears to support proxy servers, I never could get it to talk to Last.FM. Secondly, the thing was a system hog - regularly freezing up for 30 - 60 seconds at a time when I tried to do anything. No thanks. And then the kicker: no support for AAC. Start -> Control Panel -> Add or Remove Programs -> Uninstall.

MediaMonkey

Gave this one a try next. The install was quick, the software came up quickly, and it immediately recognized my iPod. Off to a good start! Didn’t seem to hog the system too much. Tried to play an AAC file… no joy. Skipped three albums in the playlist before it got to one that was .mp3 format. So much for that. Uninstall.

Songbird

When I downloaded this one, it warned me that it was just a developer’s version, that there isn’t an official release of Songbird yet. Well, I’m brave, so I gave it a try. This is definitely the slickest one yet - good graphics all the way around (icons, skins, etc). This one is built on the Mozilla browser platform, so it has way more overhead than a player really should - about 60 MB installed. Then I had to install a plugin to get it to recognize my iPod. Once I got the plugin installed, it found the iPod fine, but then I had to wait for it to load the library. So I waited. And waited. And waited some more.

It must have taken Songbird about 45 minutes to load the library information from my 25 GB media library. Still, if that was a one-time startup thing, I can live with it. And it appears that it is - though who knows if it’ll have to do a full library re-scan when I change something? No telling. I was about sold on Songbird until I actually started playing music from it. AAC support? Yep. But as I played the songs, it hiccuped my audio on a fairly regular basis - every 15 seconds or so. This wasn’t due to CPU spiking - I had plenty of free CPU left - so there must be some inefficiency in the program itself. Uninstall.

SharePod

The UI on this one appears to be a lot more barebones than some of the other contenders. The sorting options are bad; you can sort only by one field at a time (artist, album, etc), but then it doesn’t sort below that. For instance, I can sort by artist to get all of U2 grouped together… but then there’s no guarantee that the U2 albums will be grouped together. Given that I’m a guy who likes to listen to a whole album at a time, this is no good for me. Still, I should give it a try, right?

So I gave it a whirl with some .mp3-formatted files. The sound was OK, the playback controls simple but marginally adequate. Then I went to AAC. It won’t play AAC. Not only that, it doesn’t give you an error, or skip the tracks, or anything - it just sits there on the file and acts like it wants to play it, but it won’t play it. Unacceptable. Uninstall. Wait, don’t have to uninstall - this one is totally portable. Thank God for small mercies.

YamiPod

I left this one for last because it wasn’t new to me - I’ve been running YamiPod for a few years now, but only for the ability to be able to pull files back off the iPod onto the PC. I’m not real find of the UI, but it works, which is way more than I can say for some of these I’ve evaluated.

I haven’t actually tried to play anything back on it until just now. So let’s give it a try.

Amazing. It won’t play any of the files. What’s going on? Controls seem unresponsive, it’s not playing anything back. Well phooey on that. At least it’s portable, and it’ll copy files off the iPod neatly. I’ll keep it around just for that.

Winamp Winamp hasn’t been allowed on my office network computers for at least 5 years.

Conclusions:

Each of these alternative players has their strong and weak points, but when it comes down do it, none of them were good enough for me to use as a regular player. I will keep waiting for the Windows version of Amarok; right now it’s Linux-only, but there’s a Windows version coming, and Dan swears that it’s the greatest thing since sliced bread.

Until then, I’ll keep using Foobar2000. It doesn’t manage my iPod; I have to point it to the Control directory of the iPod and then have it just search for files. But it plays consistently, manages playlists nicely, and has a Last.FM plugin. So, it’s a keeper. And I guess I’ll keep using iTunes at home. It’s a resource hog sometimes, but it does what it needs to.

Well if I’m gonna gripe when I think things have gone wrongly, it is only right that I applaud when I feel that justice has been done.  :-)

I made my trip to Best Buy this afternoon with my second defective refurbished iPod.  I had been steeling myself for this visit, preparing to ask to speak to a manager if necessary.  (I’m really bad at confrontation, but this has been getting ridiculous.)  I went back to the Geek Squad counter and talked to one of their employees (one I hadn’t spoken to before).

I didn’t say much at all: “long story.  This is the second refurb I’ve gotten, and it doesn’t work, either.”  I explained the issue - the thing wouldn’t sync with the PC - it locked up after only 1 GB of transfer.  He said “let me check something real quick…” and headed off to a computer backstage.  He came back a couple of minutes later with some good news.  “Let’s just get  you a new iPod.  That should make sure it doesn’t happen again.”  FINALLY!  So I went off to the iPod counter, requested a 30 GB black iPod, and headed over to Customer Service for the cashier to ring up the transaction.

Here’s where it gets better.  They weren’t just gonna give me a straight exchange for a new 30 GB iPod (which in itself would’ve been an upgrade from the 20 GB iPod that I took in originally) - they were essentially just gonna refund back the $299 I paid for that old iPod and then credit it to me.  When I realized that was the case, I suggested that I would instead like to take that $299 credit and apply it to a $349 80 GB iPod.  The cashier was amenable to the idea, so I headed back to the iPod counter, got the 80 GB unit, and paid $50 from my pocket to get the new iPod.  As a little bonus, Best Buy’s promotion this week gives you a $30 Best Buy gift card with the purchase of said iPod, so I got that as well.

As I sit here tonight typing this up, iTunes has copied over 622 of 5773 songs onto the new iPod. I don’t think I’ll sit up to wait for the sync to complete…  but I will sure enjoy having an iPod back.  Thank you, Best Buy, for finally getting this right.

Got an automated UPS phone call a few minutes ago saying that my iPod would be delivered today, and giving me the tracking number.  Good thing it went to voice mail - no way I would’ve been able to catch the tracking number with only one live listen.    UPS’s tracking system agrees that the iPod is on the truck and out for delivery.  Now I’ll just keep my fingers crossed that this one works.

After BestBuy’s impressive performance in getting me my first refurbished iPod, it has now been 12 days since I was promised my next refurbished iPod, and I still don’t have a replacement. I called the “Geek Squad” representative last Friday; he looked it up on the computer and assured me that my second service ticket had just closed out on Friday, so I should expect my iPod in “one to two” days, and if not, I should contact him.

I decided to be gracious and assume that he meant “one to two business days”, seeing as UPS doesn’t typically deliver on Saturday or Sunday. So I waited. No UPS man yesterday. We already have a shopping trip planned to that side of town for this evening; if I don’t get that iPod via UPS today I will be making a stop back at Best Buy tonight. I’ll be curious to see what line they’ll feed me - I certainly won’t be happy with “wait a couple more days” - at a minimum I’ll want a UPS tracking number or something to prove that my iPod has actually shipped. I’d really love it if they’d say “oops, something went wrong - can we just give you a merchandise credit for the original price of your iPod?”, but I don’t think there’s much chance that’ll happen. Oh, if it did, though? I’d put another $50 with it and get the 80GB iPod with video… Oh well, at least a guy can hope, right?