Its a Sony...

The latest Reason For Not Going To The Gym that I've been able to come up with is that I don't have any music to listen to. I have an MP3 player, and, if I was organised enough, I could quite easily fill it up with enough music to occupy my intended gym time (and remember to charge the batteries), but I'm never that organised. The solution to this problem, I decided, was to buy an MP3 player with a built in FM tuner, so I would still be able to listen to the radio even if I didn't have any other music.

So on Sunday, I went to JB HiFi to make said purchase. I wanted a 1GB MP3 player with an FM tuner. Simple. So I got a 2GB Soniq player for $97 plus an extended three year warranty for an extra $30. I got it home and discovered that it didn't have integrated USB. Which means that I need a cable to transfer music from my computer to the player. Inconvenient, though not a huge problem, if I'm at home. A downright nuisance if I'm at someone else's house and want to, er, borrow some of their music.

So I took the Soniq player back today and swapped it for a shiny new Sony player. It's got 1GB of memory, integrated USB, an FM tuner and it charges from the USB port of my computer, for a mere $30 more than the original Soniq player plus the warranty. I took it home and unwrapped it, read the instructions and installed the software on my computer (whilst vaguely wondering what the software was actually for). The instructions quite clearly state that you must use the included software to transfer files onto the player, but, as a technical person, I figured I wasn't the intended audience for said instructions. Shunning the nasty interface of the Sony software, I attempted to upload my music the old fashioned way. Boy was I in for a horrible surprise.

There is a point to the nasty software. It converts my lovely MP3s into a horrible Sony proprietry format known as ATRAC. My fantastic new MP3 player can't play MP3s!

I'm just not sure how I feel about this. Fanatical audio buffs aside, there isn't too much difference between the two formats, quality-wise. I mean, there's always people out there who refuse to listen to MP3s because of their supposed inferior sound quality, but I personally can't hear it. And I can still store MP3s on my player, I just can't play them. But it's damn inconvenient - after all, I wanted an MP3 player. And the program that I have to use to transfer songs onto the player is a massive pain. It's probably alright to use if you're the kind of person who carefully categorises all their music by artist and album and puts nice tags full of random, useless information on all their files, but seriously, can you see me doing that?

So can I take this one back too?

Wire Less?

So, it turns out my wireless router has this really cool feature whereby it can work as a wireless router or a wired router, but not both at once. Cool, huh? And once something's been plugged into the LAN port, a computer with a WLAN connection can't access the router (or internet) at all, unless it's first connected via the LAN.

In other interesting news, I went to Queanbeyan for the first time today. It was everything I'd imagined it would be. Flannel shirts and mullets abounded. It was just like being in Ipswich, right up to the obvious effort the local council had put into making the centre of town nice, while ignoring the outlying areas. The sign on the way in says something along the lines of "Queanbeyan: country lifestyle with all the advantages of city living". Now whereas I would list 7-11s and public transport as the advantages of city living, I suspect the authors of this sign had things more like street lights and paved roads in mind. There's a reason Queanbeyan is called No-Hopetown. Seriously, the businesses there won't even hire the residents if they can at all avoid it.

So, what else happened this week? (I hear you ask). Not a lot. I went to work. I drove one of my friends to the airport on Thursday and got to drive around in his Peugeot for the day, which was fun. It went "zooom" and had power windows and power steering and all those fun things.

Oh, and yesterday I went to the Department of Transport to change my licence over. Which didn't go quite as well as I might have hoped. Apparently my car has run through five red lights since I moved to the ACT. I find this quite interesting, as I certainly have no memory of running any red lights. Dale was driving my car a fair bit when we first moved here, so I immediately quizzed him, but he claims not to have run any red lights either. And I'm inclined to believe him. Running red lights is just not one of those things that people do. I mean, everyone speeds a little bit every now and then, but who runs red lights? And there's red light cameras all over the ACT! Even if a person did have a secret red-light-running fetish, surely they wouldn't do it here?

We've come up with a few possible explanations, starting with "maybe the car was just a little bit over the line or something" and getting more outrageous from there - in Canberra, sometimes it's legal to turn left on a red light, maybe we got photographed doing that? At any rate, they're sending out the infringement notice next week, and I've requested to see the photos too. After all the problems they've had with fixed speed cameras in the last couple of years, I'm willing to entertain the idea of a fault with the camera. I just hope the picture shows enough to prove it if there is (and that it shows Dale driving, not me!).

Spring has sprung?

It snowed today. No really. If you're not keeping track, it's November. Summer officially begins in two weeks. And it snowed. Not proper snow, I'll admit - it never made it to the ground. And I didn't actually see it myself. But I'm willing to take the word of random people I've never met before. And there was definitely icy rain at the very least.

Canberra really has odd weather. The maximum temperature today was 13 degrees, at 1am. The minimum was 6 degrees at 4pm. It's going to be 0 tomorrow, with frost.

The one thing that I am slightly worried about is the weather warnings for today - there was a small boat warning for the lakes and a sheep grazier warning. So far I've managed to stay clear of sheep graziers, but you can never be too careful...

It just keeps getting better...

Today was one of those days. I woke up late and cold. I got to work and realised that I'd left my AccessCard (which gives me access to buildings at work and my computer) at home. I went to have a cup of tea and discovered I'd run out of tea.

Then, after lunch, I found out that one of my friends was killed in a car accident over the weekend when the car his girlfriend was driving collided with a truck towing three horses. Don't worry though, the horses were fine (according to this news article). So, how was your day?