Infinite State

There’s a powerful mixture of pride and fear when you see your kids face big waves for the first time.

After years of teaching them to love the ocean, this past weekend I found myself facing a surprisingly big gnarly set of waves with them. Getting back into shore was not an option. It was dive through and come up the other side, and they did.

I like MediaMonkey for managing my mp3 library. I have a Windows iPod with some .m4a files on it that I wanted to get into my .mp3 library, so…

1. Enable disk access on the iPod
2. Download this plug-in and copy the .dll to your MediaMonkey plugins directory
3. Fire up MediaMonkey
4. Open the iPod device (should show up in your tree of devices on the left)
5. Select the tunes you want
6. Use Tools->Convert in MM and specify MP3

So easy, but such a pain to figure out.

I know it’s been around for awhile. I even sat in the back of a taxi in 1993 using a Mobidem (a packet data radio from RAM Mobile Data) with the windows email client I’d just written for it and had the experience of getting and sending email on the move…

But I recently plugged my Blackberry into my laptop and started using it as a modem in cars and trains and houses without easy connectivity. Not fast, but it works. Looks like I was just getting about 58k downloads in Firefox. And of course, I’m posting this while speeding through some mid-island towns on the Long Island Rail Road. Let me tell you, the LIRR needs all the help it can get and this helps.

Part of what kept me back was having to install the connectivity software that Verizon provided. My experience of Verizon never encouraged me to think that their code was anything I’d want running on my system…but finally I needed that connectivity more than my fear and tried it out. Looks like Smith Micro Software (whoever they are) wrote a decent little app that works reliably on my XP laptop.

The interesting thing is that the phone/modem draws power through the USB cable from the laptop — it’s charging up while I’m using it. That doesn’t seem to be draining the laptop battery much, since I still got about 2.5 hours of steady use on my last trip. Of course, that’s not very long, but I think I get maybe 3 hours of steady use otherwise.

Ultimately the best part is just the feeling that I can use it, get online and find what I need despite being stuck on the train for a few hours. If I bothered to dig out my list of things to be searching for, I could actually get something done. But I can’t quite bring myself to research a better business bank right now.