02 Jun 2005
I bought a 5GB Zen Micro on January 29th, 2005. I’ve been quite happy with it until the last couple of days when I started having problems with a loose headphone jack. I bought it over an ipod but I may be regretting my decision. I also just bought my girlfriend a rio carbon 5GB player for $200cdn, not quite on par with the micro’s UI/L&F, but about a third cheaper.
I’m not the only one having these issues, there are numerous message board threads (one,two,three,four) that describe other peoples experiences with this problem.
It’s a great little unit but a hardware defect like this is unacceptable to me after only having it for 5 months. It hasn’t been dropped, and lives in a nice Nike running case.
I have an email into Creative support to see how best to rectify the situation. I actually bought it from Futureshop but they tend to have difficulties supporting their products unless of course you purchased their $69 extended warranty. I don’t actually expect to have Creative do much to solve my problems (unlike Toby from Yahoo! who was totally on the ball after I had problems signing up for an account). I’m posting this information to let everyone know that I’m yet another person having the loose headphone jack problem.
If anyone from Creative (support or otherwise) actually reads this and feels like sending a response, it would be most appreciated. I’ll update this post if I ever hear anything back and who knows, might just have good news.
01 Jun 2005
We have had a slot car track setup in our office for the better part of the past week. We’re attending the American Society for Mass Spectrometry conference next week and will have a hospitality suite setup to entertain clients and potential clients alike. The slot car track is going to be setup in the suite so in the interest of adequate testing (hey, we’re developers), we *just *had to get it setup and running in the office before hand. It’s actually a fairly substantial setup with one of our developers even writing a custom interface to track winning times, etc. We had a bit of fun with it at the end of today, discovering that the cars break apart and snap back together fairly easily (probably a good thing given the expected audience).
01 Jun 2005
I thought about this a short while back but until now haven’t had time to write a post about it.
What I would like to see is an integration between google maps and the current/historic weather conditions for an area. By weather conditions I’m referring to something cool like a doppler radar overlay mixed with meta-data from a site like weather.com or wunderground.com. Extensions could also include graphical wind conditions, clouds, visibility, etc.
On a related note, I’d love to see the possibility for traffic patterns (historic and current) to be overlayed onto a map. I read somewhere that google has acquired zipdash.com which may actually make this latter suggestion a reality. Hopefully they don’t ignore Canada.
I envy the google engineers that get to work on projects like these. The problem space is particularily interesting not necessarily because the technology is cutting edge but rather because the possibilities are endless. Exactly the type of problems I like to work on.