Come In Here Dear Boy

 

[Current Location| Greenwood, IN]

[have you had a violent moodswing today?| amused]

[the sounds of| The Fridge]

Huh.

This thing really does still exist.

Interesting.

Lost In Thought And Lost In Time

Last night while I was thinking through my post, I got to thinking. I started wondering if my DiaryLand blog still existed. So I just went looking for it. After working out the naming convention, I found out that it is no longer listed as active. It is probably still archived and I can get it back, but I cannot remember my password. Is it worth $19 to have them look up my info and reactivate my blog? Maybe. I don’t know.

After five minutes of scrolling through my life, it appears that I have been mildly interested in discovering the fate of my DL account since February of 2028.

Go me!

In so doing, I ended up resetting the passwords to both of my LJ accounts AND posting in one for the first time since 2007.

To quote Captain Shaw from Star Trek: Picard “It’s been kind of a weird week.”

In so trolling through my irnothing LJ account, I came across a still functioning(!) link to an old friend’s blog. I feel bad that I haven’t actually done much in the way of speaking to her for probably fifteen years now? Which is weird, considering we have never actually met.

I need to get some new friends. I need to start writing again.

I have that wacky creative prompts book. Maybe I will actually start using it.

But You're Older

Here we go again. It’s been nearly a year since last I put anything in this thing. What has changed? I’ve moved into a supervisor position at the afore mentioned medical warehouse, so that is fun.

If one of my co-workers had his way, I’d have a ‘friend’ at work. But I don’t play like that.

I found myself staring wistfully down an aisle at work this evening, ruminating on all of the bad decisions I’ve made in the last fifteen years of my life. Trying to come up with a better way of fixing everything than the plan I came up with a few months back. After that, I had to get my speaker and an iPod…I just couldn’t stand being alone with the things going on in my head anymore.

Speaking of iPods…The iPod thing sort of spiraled out of control for a couple of months. I now own ten of those plus a Zune.

I’ve done some streaming on Twitch for various things, but life got in the way.

I jumped into M:TG again for about a month. Still haven’t played an actual game with anyone for around ten years, but that is whatever.

Star Trek is actually good again these days. Lower Decks is fantastic, Strange New Worlds is equally fantastic, and Picard managed to undo the damage the movie damage to TNG’s legacy.

I’m not real happy about the state of my overall general health, but that comes of eating like crap and not doing anything about it. I guess I need to change that. More than that though, my mental health, while somewhat better than my days at The UPS Store, still leaves a lot to be desired. I feel like, for lack of a better phrase, excessive screen time, has messed up my ability to focus on things like books or think through a coherent sentence/story/idea.

It is interesting how much the phenomenon of “doom scrolling” has affected my ability to think like I used to. Yeah, not a fan of that. I’m thinking it is time to back off on things like the Kindle, Smart Watch and phone time in general. It is interesting…Where I used to pick up a book, I now pick up my phone and start scrolling through crap I don’t care about. Recently at work I’ve been reading an actual, real book on my lunch break and it is glorious!

Not just because the book is The Princess Bride.

So, so you think you can tell
Heaven from hell?
Blue skies from pain?
Can you tell a green field
From a cold steel rail?
A smile from a veil?
Do you think you can tell?

Did they get you to trade
Your heroes for ghosts?
Hot ashes for trees?
Hot air for a cool breeze?
Cold comfort for change?
Did you exchange
A walk-on part in the war
For a leading role in a cage?

How I wish, how I wish you were here
We’re just two lost souls
Swimming in a fish bowl
Year after year
Running over the same old ground
What have we found?
The same old fears
Wish you were here

Dominance

 

This week I reformatted the output files to match the color of the blog.

I also added a page listing the total play count for each iPod and a top ten albums page.

The Top Ten page is total plays of any track off an album from the entire time I track, so 10/01/2022 – Whenever I lose interest in the project.

Without further explanation, here is this week’s listening stats:

Device Plays:

This week’s music:

Top Ten Albums (Based on individual track plays):

There’s A New Kid In Town

 

I am going to try to catalog what I listen to each week and start posting it here.

I put together a spreadsheet and linked it to a mail merge file in MS Publisher so I can get a .pdf printout of the information that I want. I’ll be interested to see how this works, for how long I can keep it up, and how the spreadsheet changes along the way.

Ain’t Gonna Help You None

My previously mentioned 4th Gen iPod Photo (henceforth referred to as grossPod) has a dying HDD.  I went ahead and ordered some parts to FlashMod it, and get it running for decades more to come.

This required a series of adapters to replace the HDD with a MicroSD card:

 

 

 

 

 

We needed a cable to go from the IDE interface to something the board could handle, the board itself then a CF to SD card adapter.  I also added a SD to MicroSD adapter, because I had a 128GB MicroSD card for this project.

(Original Drive)

IPod once the modifications are complete:

 

(Everything complete)

(Still a little gross around the edges)

 

I now have (yet another) 128gb iPod for the collection.  Hooray!
 

They See Me Mowin’ My Front Lawn

 

Mowed the lawn today. The iPod Shuffle did not do a great job of shuffling…

All Your Pretty Paint And Powder

I picked up a 60gb 4th Gen iPod Photo from eBay for practically nothing.  The picture was kind of gross, to the point where people on Reddit were aware and somewhat afraid of the iPod.

 

(grossPod)

Well, it arrived a couple of days ago and true to the picture it was kind of gross.  It turns out the issues were cosmetic, so hooray for that.  It cleaned up fairly well:

 

(Considerably less grossPod)

With that, I finally got around to plugging it into the PC and looked it over with iTunes.  It turns out that the last time it played through a complete track was 3/24/2008.  I find it entertaining that the last track played was from Led Zeppelin II.  Naturally the first thing I played was the next few tracks on the album.

The time gap was entertaining to me to say the least:
 

Yes, it was a fourteen year transition between tracks.  Yes. That amuses me greatly.

With regard to the player itself.  The hard drive is failing.  It isn’t there yet, but if I transfer large amounts of data to it at a time it will just die.  Also, considering the fact that the player is 18 years old, the battery is shot.

Battery will be replaced and the HDD will be replaced with a flash card.  I just haven’t decided which one yet.  Meantime, I will continue using it.

Who’s Wine? What Wine?

So about 9 1/2 years ago my first iPod was stolen out of my car. I was very sad. I finally got around to getting replacement for that particular one.

For the record, I’ve had something like 4 between that one and this one. There is just nothing like the nostalgia factor, I guess.

I bought a brand new white 5th Generation iPod Video. Several years later it was stolen out of my car. My at the time roommate snagged another one off of craigslist for me. That one died a horrible death a few years later in a coffee accident. I got a different one on eBay. The click wheel did not work so I returned it. The replacement worked fine for a few months until someone shipped it to…No one really knows.

The current iPod is a 6th Gen iPod classic that I’ve been using for several years now. I love the thing enough that it has already gotten a new battery. It’s getting a new screen and the hard drive replaced with a flash card very soon too. BUT I finally got around to replacing the original iPod. At a guess I’d say the drive and battery are junk in this one. It has a battery showing up, probably tomorrow, and I’ll probably flashmod this one too, honestly.

I forgot how much I liked the feeling of the old one. The front is pretty beat up, maybe I’ll order a new front for it too.

Turn It Up

iPod

I have owned several of those glorious things over the years. I recently came into possession of a seventh generation iPod touch. The stated goal is to cover for the Classic while it is, more or less, down for the count.

In the autumn of 2001, very nearly the end of my high school career, a friend came in with this fancy new music player. It was an amazing piece of technology from a company I had long since written off as meh in the computer world. It was a 1st generation iPod. It was a wonderful thing and after getting to poke around with it for a few moments I decided that I must have such a thing.

I had all of this digital music that a friend had given me to poke around with a couple of years before. I was carrying a backpack full of CDs around at school so I had something to listen to when it was allowed.

But this…THIS WAS A GAME CHANGER.

Problem was cost. I had bills to pay and didn’t have hundreds of dollars laying around to splurge on a music player. I was given a couple of mp3 players as gifts over the years. A D-Link DMP90 was my first one, once it wore out I was given a Rio One Digital Audio Player, and that thing was a workhorse. It got left out in a thunderstorm once and soaked more or less clean through. Let it dry out for a few days, changed the battery and it ran for another year or two.

But, as wonderful and liberating as those two were, they just could not come close to what I most wanted out of a music player.

I wanted something that could store my entire library in a higher quality than 64kbps audio.

I kept up on the iPod stuff. Never buying, but keeping tabs on the specs. I was ready to take the plunge in something like ‘04 when the 4th generation iPod hit the market. I figured 20gb was not going to quite get me what I wanted, but I figured it would work for a while.

There was a lot going on in those days and, for whatever reason, I ended up not getting an iPod that year.

I was super excited in ‘05 when a version with a 30gb drive and color screen released. I decided that year that my tax refund was going to be what finally got me into the iPod world.

By February of 2006 $300 would get me an iPod with 30gb of storage space AND the ability to play videos. I really could not see how, outside of upgrading storage, any new features could be added in a worthwhile way, so I went ahead and got one.

I considered getting one with a larger storage capacity, but ended up getting a 3 year, no questions asked warranty with it. That iPod saw a lot of use.

Like a lot of use.

A week before the warranty ran out I made good on that. The battery was down to ~half capacity and the screen had a few dead pixels on it. They shipped it off, and I got it back a week or so later with a new screen and battery.

That thing was still going strong when it got stolen out of my car in January of 2013. A month and a half shy of my 7th year with it. Fun Fact!™ I’m still bitter about that! My at-the-time roommate was nice enough to source a replacement for it on Craigslist a few months later. That one met its end in a puddle of coffee in the car. I don’t think I still have the pieces for it, but, now that I think about it, I may…

Six years later.

The replacement to that one was, I think, shipped to AT&T by one of my not so smart former co-workers and that was the end of that chapter. Shortly after, I managed to source another one on eBay for a reasonable sum – a 6th generation iPod classic with 80gb of storage. Again, that thing sees near daily use. Things got dicey for a while a couple of years ago when the battery decided to give out. Post battery replacement, it has been going strong.

Recently, the internal drive started acting up. I decided to take it out of daily use for a while in order to assess my options. While I would love a brand new iPod classic with modern features such as rapid transfer, flash storage, and Bluetooth, I have to settle for the fact that Apple is not going to do that for me. I snagged a 32gb iPod Touch, but it is… meh. Sure, it has Bluetooth and flash storage, and the things transfer a little faster, but it doesn’t have any character. It is seriously a phone-less iPhone, and that makes me sad.