Cheesy Quintessence

Yesterday I finally got my SanDisk Sansa e270, part of SanDisk’s fairly new e200 series of flash-based MP3 players. The e270 is notable for being the most spacious flash based player yet, at 6 GB, or up to 7 GB if the expansion slot is used. It’s quite a heck of a bargain, too, as it has a user-replaceable lithium ion battery, 20 hours quoted battery life, a scratch-resistant design, voice recording, an FM tuner, video playback, and a picture slideshow, and a fairly attractive design, for less than the cost of the 4 GB iPod nano.

Perhaps this all sounds too good to be true. Indeed, it has its shortcomings. It is a very nice music player overall, but since I don’t find it particularly innovative in many ways other than its feature set as described above, I’m just going to note my complaints:

• The wheel feels quite rough, and the middle button wiggles a bit. Doesn’t have a high quality feel to it, which is a contrast to the rest of the player.
• Nobody else has mentioned this as far as I’ve seen: the screen isn’t reflective at all; unless the backlight is on, it may as well just be blank, it’s so hard to see. This hold true even in direct sunlight.
• The wheel light always goes off after a few seconds of no wheel use, regardless of backlight settings. So, the wheel light is constantly turning on and off, rather annoyingly. I’d like to see a custom time for the wheel light, and the option to just disable it, as it’s useless.
• Leaving the now playing screen, including shutting down, when the player started with music paused causes it to forget what was playing. Avoidable by resuming playback before doing so.
• When shut off, it forgets where its volume was set. I wouldn’t mind so much if it didn’t set the volume too high.
• Certain functionality is difficult to get to. For example, to add music to the on the go playlist, you have to start it playing first. Also, there’s no way to directly browse all songs by an artist; you have to “play all,” then go to the playback list. Getting back to that list isn’t particularly intuitive either, as there’s no button to go up a menu level from the playback screen like there is from other menu screens (previous track is used to go up a level, and is used normally on the playback screen).
• The record button is quite easy to press and causes active music to stop playing.
• When browsing an artist’s albums, the album you select is saved so it can be remembered later. Unfortunately, it remembers this for all album screens. If you select Album 2 by Artist 1, then go to Artist 2’s album list, Artist 2’s second album, instead of the first album in the list, will be selected. This is fairly disorienting.
• A friend and I have both had issues with it “refreshing database” over and over. This takes forever for it to accomplish. I can’t figure out why it happens, but it seems to have something to do with certain stuff I put in the music library.
• In regard to the problem above, top rated songs seem to be lost when a refresh happens.

Obviously, nearly all these problems could be fixed with a firmware update. I’d be incredibly satisfied with the player if most of these issues were addressed. I’d have already contacted SanDisk with this list, but it seems there’s no technical support email address for the e270 in the US. Shame.

A few weeks ago, the left button on my Logitech MX310 optical mouse broke, so I’ve been in search of a new mouse. I was saddened to find that I couldn’t get something as good as the MX310 for any less than it cost me to get it nearly two years before, so, despite being happy with that model, I decided I may as well take the opportunity to improve my mousing experience.

The first mouse I tried was the Logitech LX7 for about $40. It’s a pretty cute mouse, but ultimately I decided I couldn’t tolerate it due to amount of time the mouse takes to wake up from its power-conserving sleep mode. It was very nice to have the freedom of a wireless mouse at last, though, as I could use it on my keyboard tray, which is a more comfortable height for my hands and closer to me.

After that, I decided to go all out and get the Logitech MX1000, which is renowned for its amazing speed at waking up–with good reason, as I have found out. I also love the shape of it, which is very much like an old four-button ball mouse of old that I used for many years; it’s a bit big, but it’s very comfortable, whereas the LX7 was a little bit too narrow. So now I’m happy, right?

Wrong. Now I have another problem. The mouse limps on my desk. I’m not sure why, either, as it only limps when it’s set on the desk facing a certain direction. None of my other mice do this, but they’re not as wide. Interestingly, even putting a piece of paper between the desk and the mouse stops the limping. Unfortunately, this means I need a mousing surface on my keyboard tray, which doesn’t have room for such a thing with my keyboard there at the same time. So, now I have to figure out how to resurface my keyboard tray evenly, preferably without buying a 21×12″ mousepad.

I think I may have figured out why Nintendo removed Pokémon Gold and Silver’s wonderful clock, which added a sense of realism to the game in that you had to play at real physical times in order to accomplish certain goals, from the latest generation of Pokémon games. It seems that after less than five short years, my Pokémon Gold and Silver batteries have been drained; my game saves, in which I had a nice team and all 251 Pokemon, have been completely lost, and the cartridges can no longer remember games.

I feel strangely hurt by this. Pokémon Gold and Silver meant a lot to me back in the day. I have very fond memories of exploring the game for the first time, with its incredibly innovative features (such as the clock and the cellular phone), and I feel like a part of myself has been lost now that I can’t go back and live what I did way back in 2001. That’s especially true since the best part for me was exploring Kanto again; the way Nintendo presented the old world was, for me, incredibly nostalgically satisfying. I sure hope Nintendo decides to give the Gold and Silver generation a facelift like it did with Red/Green/Blue.

It’s been forever since I posted anything here. I’m sure anybody who ever read this blog before no longer does now. Alas, that’s not entirely true… now the wretched spammers read my blog. Just last week, I began to get an onslaught of spam comments… make this body part bigger, gamble online, get free stuff… every few minutes. Indeed, I had gotten spam before, but not on that level. I was forced to install Akismet, a free, collaborative WordPress anti-spam tool that learns from its mistakes as people fix them. It caught 7 spam within a day or two after I installed it.

Now the spammers don’t read my blog anymore, either–Akismet has been dry ever since the day after I installed it. Well, there were two spam that didn’t get caught. However, I do still, for some reason, find it annoying that the spammers go away when I protect myself from them.

Today I read an article claiming that MySpace’s design works. The article extensively makes excuses for the simplicity, ugliness and inconsistency of MySpace’s design, justifying it by claiming that it’s effective for the target audience. While I would agree that a design need not be complex or filled with eye candy like so many sites’ designs are, the article’s other points are fairly ridiculous.

Consitency in design could be attained with less complex code if MySpace would make correct use of CSS. Why waste time to look crappy and inconsistent? Because of the way it’s coded, what consistency MySpace does have is extremely time-consuming to maintain (for example, stylistic HTML attributes are everywhere). Even if the target audience doesn’t care, the exhibited cluelessness of MySpace’s web interface coders is costing them time and money (especially in bandwidth costs, considering this is the 7^th most popular English site on the web).

Another point made by the article is equally ridiculous:

MySpace permits users to do almost anything to the look of their profile pages, and the prevailing aesthetic is decidedly “more is more”: more color, more animation, more typefaces, more sound, more of everything makes a better profile page.

Of course, properly styling a MySpace profile is impossible (not that it matters anyway, considering the inherent validity of a MySpace page’s markup). Additionally, since MySpace is stuck back in 1995, using HTML attributes to change the presentation of almost everything, it’s impossible to customize the look of specific elements of a profile. As a result, anything you can do to customize a MySpace profile will look even more hideous than the design of MySpace itself.