In case you were wondering: the reason I haven’t been blogging is because I’ve become a boring person. A more boring person than before, that is. When you’re boring, it’s really hard to fake being interesting, especially on the internet where plagiarism can be verified.
I’ve also become an annoying person, so I’m doing you a double favour here by staying away from the “Publish” button. Boring and annoying is a bad combination. You could add smelly for a trifecta of suck, but I did just have a shower, not that you’d know this.
I’m boring and annoying because all I’ve been doing lately is either working or worrying about work or worrying that I’m working too much or worrying that I’m worrying about work too much. And not sleeping. And worrying about how I’m not getting enough sleep. The realization that this is a recursive pattern of FAIL isn’t enough to break me from it.
I’m supposed to give a review about the Zune mp3 player I got free from Matchstick.ca a few weeks back, but the only way I could make it run was to put wheels on it and push it down a hill. The damn thing insists on Windows XP/Vista as its home base OS of choice, which hardly makes it an “iPod killer” since Mac users are shit outta luck and iTunes runs on both Macs and PCs. Oh, and the iPod has been reverse-engineered by Linux geeks, but the Zune 1. has fewer interested hackers, and 2. has proven to be a bloody nuisance and so far impossible to hack due to DRM and authentication protocols (from what I read).
I took the Zune to my dad’s to install the software on his PC. I waited over half an hour for the software to install (Dad’s computer is S-L-O-W) and then at the end I got the error message above. Grr. But since Dad was more interesting than me being mad at Microsoft I gave up trying to fix it after another ten minutes and spent the rest of the day with him.
I then decided to put a virtual version of Windows XP on my Ubuntu machine at work, using Virtualbox, to run the Zune software. Installed Virtualbox. Installed Windows XP in Virtualbox. Spent hours downloading and installing all the fucking service packs for XP. Installed the Zune software. Was installing drivers to allow XP to detect the USB ports (the last step) when somehow I broke Ubuntu. I rebooted and it wouldn’t get past the login screen. I rebooted again and it wouldn’t even get there. The sysadmin at work couldn’t help me so I spent most of last Monday reinstalling Ubuntu; and I had to work into the evening once it was up again. I am now avoiding putting XP on my work computer again as I feel the gods are telling me to stay away from the System Idle Process.
So far this Zune review is a FAIL, potentially EPIC should I try again and not manage to get the thing running. The device (which is so light it even sucks as a paperweight) is taunting me with a list of features on its screen, but if I try to click on anything it tells me to go to www.zune.net. Which is sad since it’s supposedly got a built-in FM radio and it shouldn’t need the internet for that, what with radio waves being in the air and all. Maybe it just doesn’t like me.