I am now loading music onto my Creative Nomad Jukebox Zen Xtra portable player, but it has taken hours of fussing and cussing to learn how to do it. I first learned how to "rip" and "burn" CD's. No doubt, "pillage" and "rape" come next. Once the hapless CD's encoded sound has been ripped and thrown into the captivity of my hard drive, then I have to turn on the software that does the transfer between my computer and the Zen Xtra player. Then I plug the USB jack from the computer into my player. Bing-a-ling! A nice sound tells me that it is connected. Now I read from the Creative Nomad manual:

5. In the Right Panel window, click the Source bar and select the destination.

But…there is no right panel. Huh? I fool around with some of the Windows "buttons" and "view" options at the top of the screen, and finally after some random clicking, the right panel appears. But there is no "Source" bar at the top of the panel, only something telling what part of my computer's files it is showing. "My Documents/My Music," for instance. OK, so I guess that is the "Source" bar. The left panel top bar says "Source," but not the right one.

6. Click the Destination Transfer button to transfer the selected tracks. The Now Transferring dialog box appears, showing the current transfer status…

Uh, there is no Destination Transfer button. Nothing at all that says that. There is a button that says "Import files" and I try that one. That sort of works. Now I have a jumble of tracks from the album I wanted to place on the player, and all the tracks are out of order. Then I realize that this whole portable MP3 player thing is oriented towards listeners whose attention span is no longer than a single three-minute song. Doesn't anyone listen to an album all the way through, with the tracks in the order the artist wanted them to be in? More grubbing around in this slick but annoying interface, and I am back looking at a list of the tracks from my album. No information about anything. Title: Unknown. Artist: Unknown. Genre: Unknown. Order of tracks: no information. Then some more cultural revelations for me. Commercial albums on CD come with information about titles, artists, genres, etc. already encoded on the album. But the type of albums I like, which are obscure, rare, and often privately produced, don't have that information. I have to type it all in myself before I transfer the album over to the player, otherwise the player can't make sense of it nor put the tracks in order. I need to read the tiny type on the CD album cover, and remember the often inane titles of the tracks long enough to type 'em into the Creative Nomad Music Source utility. Only then can I select the album and drag it into the window where the transfer will be documented. This doesn't take long. Whew! I test it out by disconnecting the player and listening to it on headphones. Finally! I can hear ambient drone! But of course I have to fool around with the player some more to get it to play more than one track in sequence, rather than either stopping with only one, or "shuffling" tracks from my albums all together in a mishmosh. I have learned how to run this player more from just trying all the options and fooling around with it, than I have from reading the fu…tile manual. I want a "Creative Nomad Concert Hall Orthodox Extra." Forget the Zen, this hasn't been one of those Zen moments.

Now back to physics. (Place earphones on head, push "Play.") "Uniform Circular Motion," the book reads. "Centripetal Acceleration. We now turn to a situation of great interest where we do not have constant acceleration. This is the case of an object moving with constant speed v around a circular path of radius r."
Well, that does sum up my experiences in physics. Maybe someday I'll be able to break away from the circle and shoot off on a new, if tangential, path.

Posted at 1:53 am | link