In Tasmania, I've been exposed to the joy that is a regional newspaper. The guilty party in question for today's disgrace is a publication known as "The Examiner", known more commonly among locals by the endearing term "The Exaggerator".
At least half the paper is dominated by a mixture of sport (the majority of which is AFL - Australian Football League, for those who don't know) and local news like car parking or someone's pet dog barking and rescuing the neighbours from a house fire. No, this is not a joke.
The "World News" section is typically one or two pages, at least half of which is occupied by an advertisement for a local or national company. While this is bad enough, many of the stories are the sort of "light-hearted" stories one might find in the "oddity" section of any other media, focussing on escaped animals or strange occurrences rather than meaty issues such as ongoing conflicts, a world financial crisis, or international politics.
Today's glaring offence was in regards to the dreadful bombing of the Marriot Hotel in Pakistan.. While this event was given an entire two page spread (minus the ridiculously large advertisements, of course) the reporting was still terrible. After a brief discussion of the event, one article changed its focus completely, instead devoting a not insigificant percentage of its allotted space to start reporting on the tragedy's relevance... to cricket. Apparently the concern over the effect that this will have on cricket in Pakistan and what now seems like a prudent decision to not tour in the country is far greater than the concern over the loss of life that has occurred.
Oh, woe is me.
Sunday, September 21, 2008
Sony 1 - Winamp 0
My inaugural blog post is dedicated to something that happened not too long ago. I was fortunate enough to receive a Sony NWZ-A726 Walkman for my birthday from some very good friends. They were smart enough to know that a portable MP3 player was something that I would cherish, particularly if it wasn't one of those accursed iPods.
An amusing fact is that for quite some time, all Australian airlines classifed all such devices as iPods in their "please turn off all electronic devices" speech, rather than learning that the iPod was a specific instance of a greater class of devices. And yes, the usage of the the word "greater" there was deliberate, as the iPod is a somewhat over-priced, underfeatured and "locked-in" solution. I do not want to be forced to use iTunes (and all associated "bonus features" that get installed without my consultation) or some hacked up iPod manager software to get music on to my MP3 player.
Enter the Sony NWZ-A726. Sure, Sony have been known for some rather poor practices in the past as well, but rather than harping on about previous cases of extremely bad judgement, let's focus on something awesome. Or rather, two things. 1. Drag and Drop. 2. Format support. Sony recently came to the realisation that people just want to be able to plug in a MP3 player and dump their music directly on it without having to use some proprietary software or format. Bravo!
This alone makes it a winner in my book, but even aside from that, it's a really nice MP3 player with good sound quality and excellent earbuds. For once, the things don't try to tear your cartilage apart for the entirety of the time that you're attempting to listen to your music. All I can say is: about freaking time.
Of course, as any Olympic opening ceremony can prove, nothing goes off without a hitch, and my aggravation came in the simple form of plugging the thing into my computer. Doing so abruptly stopped the music that was playing on my PC. Confused, I looked at my screen to find the Winamp (my PC MP3 player of choice) had crashed. Attempting to start it up again resulted in the same abrupt crash.
Unplug MP3 player.
Start Winamp... Winamp starts.
Plug in MP3 player... Winamp dies.
After a few hours of frustration and intermittent swearing, emails and forum posts, I managed to track down the issue to not Sony, but Winamp. A poorly coded dll (pmp_4s.dll) tries to access the portable upon it being plugged in. Since Windows is already trying to talk to the device, Winamp apparently does something "naughty" (great technical term, huh?) when it tries to talk to it, causing Windows to kill Winamp in a rather authoritarian manner, proving once again that - Windows: it doesn't play nice with the other children.
So the solution was to tell Winamp not to try and do more things than it should. Which to be honest, should be a very short list, as I don't really need an MP3 to burn CDs, download album art, set up a sharing network to allow others to remotely access my music collection, be the exclusive tool allowable to upload content to my MP3 player... Sorry, I'd gotten off that high horse several paragraphs ago.
My ideal PC MP3 player does the following:
Plays MP3s.
The End.
An amusing fact is that for quite some time, all Australian airlines classifed all such devices as iPods in their "please turn off all electronic devices" speech, rather than learning that the iPod was a specific instance of a greater class of devices. And yes, the usage of the the word "greater" there was deliberate, as the iPod is a somewhat over-priced, underfeatured and "locked-in" solution. I do not want to be forced to use iTunes (and all associated "bonus features" that get installed without my consultation) or some hacked up iPod manager software to get music on to my MP3 player.
Enter the Sony NWZ-A726. Sure, Sony have been known for some rather poor practices in the past as well, but rather than harping on about previous cases of extremely bad judgement, let's focus on something awesome. Or rather, two things. 1. Drag and Drop. 2. Format support. Sony recently came to the realisation that people just want to be able to plug in a MP3 player and dump their music directly on it without having to use some proprietary software or format. Bravo!
This alone makes it a winner in my book, but even aside from that, it's a really nice MP3 player with good sound quality and excellent earbuds. For once, the things don't try to tear your cartilage apart for the entirety of the time that you're attempting to listen to your music. All I can say is: about freaking time.
Of course, as any Olympic opening ceremony can prove, nothing goes off without a hitch, and my aggravation came in the simple form of plugging the thing into my computer. Doing so abruptly stopped the music that was playing on my PC. Confused, I looked at my screen to find the Winamp (my PC MP3 player of choice) had crashed. Attempting to start it up again resulted in the same abrupt crash.
Unplug MP3 player.
Start Winamp... Winamp starts.
Plug in MP3 player... Winamp dies.
After a few hours of frustration and intermittent swearing, emails and forum posts, I managed to track down the issue to not Sony, but Winamp. A poorly coded dll (pmp_4s.dll) tries to access the portable upon it being plugged in. Since Windows is already trying to talk to the device, Winamp apparently does something "naughty" (great technical term, huh?) when it tries to talk to it, causing Windows to kill Winamp in a rather authoritarian manner, proving once again that - Windows: it doesn't play nice with the other children.
So the solution was to tell Winamp not to try and do more things than it should. Which to be honest, should be a very short list, as I don't really need an MP3 to burn CDs, download album art, set up a sharing network to allow others to remotely access my music collection, be the exclusive tool allowable to upload content to my MP3 player... Sorry, I'd gotten off that high horse several paragraphs ago.
My ideal PC MP3 player does the following:
Plays MP3s.
The End.
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