Friday, June 1, 2012

I think my husband is a genius as well as a nice guy.  These last few days have been a huge pain in the ass technology wise.

It all started a year ago when I downloaded and listened to two books about a zombie apocalypse and bloggers.  Yes, bloggers.  It's called The Newsflesh Trilogy (Feed and Deadline are the first two).  I love these books.  They are fun and interesting and a great listen.

The third book came out in audio form this week.  Instead of waiting months for the library to get a copy and then have to wait until it was my turn, I decided to actually buy it.  I went to amazon and they sent me to audible.com which turned out to be a totally unsatisfactory experience.  It seems that I was only going to be able to download it to my computer and not my mp3 player which they don't support.  I thanked the nice young man and said that I didn't want the book after all.

Pk suggested itunes.  I am not a fan of apple as a whole but I really wanted the book so I bought it.  It turned out to be a mpeg4 (and  I have no real idea what that is, except that it is not compatible with an mp3 player).  After many frustrating hours, Pk remembered he had an old ipod and managed to download the book and let me borrow his device for 17 hours to listen to the book.  This is still not ideal since I'd like to download the book to my player to keep it there but that is not likely to happen anytime soon.  I tried all kinds of internet programs to "convert" the files but since it's protected material, they didn't work.  Why can't the devices all get along?

I've listened to about an hour so far and it's good.  If you are a fan of zombie apocalypse literature (and really, who isn't?), then I highly recommend this one.  I promise it won't lower your IQ more than a few points.  You can go read/listen to some Dickens or something high brow afterwards to restore your brain power if you like.  Me?  I like a good zombie book once in a while.

I finished baby sweater number two tonight.  I put plain buttons on it and washed and blocked it .  I think I could become addicted to making these.  They're small and easy and adorable when they're done.  This is a quick cell phone photo but the color is fairly true.  It's a great green/grey color dyed by Jessie of A Piece of Vermont.  She doesn't run her shop anymore which makes me sad because I liked her yarn and rovings very much.  I'm looking around for another gender neutral color to start another one. 

I have not made much progress on Bigger on the Inside since we have this woman in the knitting group who is demanding so much attention that no one else gets any of their own knitting/crocheting done.  She comes in with new plans each week but never makes anything.  It was a blanket, a scarf, a beret, and now it's a dog sweater.  We have decided that next week we're going to tell her to just pick one thing and start it.  It's great to be ambitious but not when it gets in the way of doing anything.

I have a fairly quiet weekend planned.  I've been spinning some very thin singles and hope to ply them to see if I've got the laceweight thing down so I'm ready for the tour de fleece at the end of the month.  Pk and Em are going canoeing tomorrow.  If they leave me my car, I'll go grocery shopping and take the car through inspection and run some other errands.  Other than that, the weekend is mine. 

Right now, I'm listening to the rain.  There seems to be a rather wicked band of storms coming up the coast which will hopefully bypass us to the north.  The rain would be good if it doesn't come down in buckets and the wind doesn't knock down trees.  We're having a tornado watch until 9 pm.  So far, it's been raining on and off in the way of summer storms and there was a small bit of thunder.  Not too bad but I probably shouldn't say that out loud......

Have a good weekend!



5 comments:

Galad said...

I download to my MP3 player all the time from Audible. It's a little SanDisk that I first heard about from you. I have Audible Manager(which I downloaded from their site) on my computer and pick some or all of the books I've downloaded and sync with the SanDisk.

amy said...

I woke up at 5 am to the sound of pouring rain. We have no plans this weekend and I was hoping to sew a skirt for myself, so the only thing that's suffering is we can't cut the grass today.

Cute little baby sweater! It looks like the kind that will get used, too--the best kind of sweater!

roxie said...

Wonderful baby sweater. Knitting baby sweaters is sort of like eating potato chips. the first one is so nice you can't help but try another.

Yeah, technology is supposed to make life easier. But I don't know how to make my camera talk to my computer and my cell-phone photos need to be e-mailed and downloaded before I can post them on blogger. Glad PK solved your audio book problem!

Hope the weekend is tornado-free and very restful!

DrK said...

i havent read any zombie stuff but i did watch The Walking Dead and loved it. im all for low brow! but your experience is a further reason for me to stick with old fashioned paper books!

Saren Johnson said...

I use autobite to convert files to MP3's, it does strip out DRM. SHHH

Lovely baby sweater.

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