Vehicle Trouble

When it rains, it pours!

We're set to move to a new house at the end of this week, and my truck gets a flat tire last Friday on my way out of town. I had to have it towed because of where the truck was; it was right on the freeway where I could get killed by cars going 60 mph. I had to wait 45 minutes, but the tow truck finally got there and towed my truck to a shop. They price out the tires that I want and started to pull the bad tire off, and they call me over to look at something. It turns out that the force of my truck going 60 mph and the rim hitting the concrete split the rim! Not only that but the bracket that holds the brake caliper was gone; the caliper was there, just not the bracket. I ended up having to find a bracket at a salvage yard to keep from having to pay quadruple for the part at a dealer.

Since I was headed to College Station where Christy was staying with her parents, Christy and her dad drove half-way (to West, TX - The Czech Stop!!!), and Christy's sister Angie and her husband Jeremy picked me up and drove to West so that I could go on to College Station.

MP3 Player Frustrations

I have a Sandisk Sansa m240 1GB MP3 player. I really enjoy listening to music or audio books on it. I think there's a BIG problem with it, but apparently Sandisk doesn't agree with me. My player doesn't always play files in track order. If I want to listen to an entire album or audio book in the order that it was published, I should be able to do that without user intervention! But I have found that when I load the files onto the player, even if the files have the proper tags the player doesn't always play them in that order! I have tried everything from making sure that the "shuffle" feature is turned off (obviously), re-tagging the files both directly on the player and on my computer (then re-copying them to the player), and even submitting a ticket with Sandisk. I can't seem to get it to work consistently.

The last response I got from Sandisk was that I needed to format the player just like I would format a floppy disk or hard drive. The reason they gave me was that the player was just like any other media in that it can get corrupted over time with copying and deleting files and that it needed regular attention (formatting) in order for it to keep working properly. So I followed their instructions to format the player (after backing up my music files), returned my backed up files to the player, and it still didn't work! I even made sure that I had the latest firmware to make sure that that wasn't the problem. I still can't get it to work properly.

Then today, I was listening to War of the Worlds by H. G. Wells that I downloaded from Librivox.org. The audio book files did not have track numbers in the tags, so I made sure that they were there before copying the files to my player. The book is split into Book 1 and Book 2 with each "book" having multiple chapters. There is 1 audio file for each chapter. Even though I re-tagged the files so that they have track numbers, starting with Book 1 Chapter 1 as Track 1 through Book 2 Chapter 10 (the last chapter) as Track 27, my Sandisk player played them in this order: Book 1 Chapter 1, Book 2 Chapter 1, Book 1 Chapter 2, Book 2 Chapter 2, etc. I couldn't believe it! After all the trouble that I went through (not really) to make sure that the track numbers were there, because the guy at Sandisk told me that the player will play in track number order, it still didn't play them in the correct order!

I'm so frustrated with this player that I'm almost ready to ditch it and go with something that will work. I don't want to get an iPod just because they cost too much and the ones that have the highest capacity have hard drives in them and are too subject to shock (skipping, failing, etc.) just like any other hard drive. If I had access to the source code for the firmware, I might have a go at trying to fix it myself. But something makes me think that Sandisk won't want to let me do that.

Thanks for letting me rant. :-)