Thursday, April 29, 2010

2010.04.29 Thursday

I turned my alarm off this morning, but then I could keep hearing it faintly beeping so I smacked the snooze button again. ... beep beep beep ... The thing wasn't turning off. WHAT'S GOING ON? Turns out Hab's alarm sounds really similar to mine, and I could hear it faintly from across the house. Good timing too...

Went to a lengthy lunch meeting that served us some Rudy's BBQ, but that also threw off my gym plans. Dang.

Left work early and picked up my car from the Mazda Service Center. The sunroof looks in much better condition than before. It looks like it sits in the hole much better this time. The guy I worked with at the center said they had to contact some higher-ups and bitch and complain so that they would cover this under warranty. I was afraid that I was going to have to do all that complaining, but this process has been mostly painless. More businesses should be like this.

Went home and started packing my stuff for a trip to Arlington. I needed to load up some music on my MP3 player and decided it was a good time to figure out my my player stopped working with album art. The way I organize my music, the cover art is attached to each song, and not included as an extra file in the directory (so yeah that wastes a bit more space, but if the song is separated from the folder, all the information is attached). This used to be fine, but lately has stopped working. Well, I kinda figured out where the problem lies. The way Windows 7 installs a generic media player driver, it doesn't work perfectly with my Creative Zen Vision: M 30GB. This was only determined after I tried many different versions of ID3 tags, different picture formats, and without any success. I tried downloading some drivers and software from Creative to handle this, but it wouldn't install on Win 7. After playing around with that some, I found out that the driver download from Creative's site defaults to Win XP (and 32-bit), so it just would not work whatsoever. I found a Windows Vista (64-bit) driver and was able to get that to install without having to do any "compatibility mode" tweaking. Then I transferred an album over, and BAM, it worked on the first try. Sweetness! Then I started copying all the music (that I haven't listened to yet...) to my player. BAM, new problem. Every time I try to copy a huge chunk of albums with Creative's Media Explorer (which is an add-on to Window's Explorer windows) it would cause Explorer.exe to crash. I can copy 2 albums, but not 10; 4 albums but not 5. I guess 4 albums at a time is my limit to transfer. That's stupid, and doesn't even make sense. Ugh.

Anyways, left for Arlington. It's so nice being back in my own car. Since it is a Thursday (though it doesn't feel like it) the roads were pretty clear. I set my cruise control a few miles after I got on I-35, and only had to adjust it a couple times by the time I got to I-20 near Fort Worth. Besides the occasional group of people that felt like going 80mph at night passing me, there was an out-of-control 18-wheeler that was one of those livestock trailers. It almost hit me twice, coming up from behind at 80, and when it cut over to the left lane to pass. Asshats.

Made it safely, went to bed.

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