My wireless router croaked last week
I’ve been writing a little less than usual lately (though nobody has complained) due to a home network failure. And printserver failure. And AirTunes failure.
Just one box failed though
My trusty little Airport Express, a white box about the size of an Apple MacBook power supply, played a triple role: extending the wireless network to the StorageMojo global data center; print server; and AirTunes server with an optical interface to the Outlaw receiver.
Or it was trusty, until last week, when after some intermittant flakiness, it finally stopped working. No network, no printer and worst of all: no music!
Gosh, it’s cool to listen to CDs
That was the major storage learning: even though I love iTunes Party Shuffle mode, it was a revelation to listen to CDs straight through. Differences in instruments, styles, rhythms and more that get lost when one hears a band’s songs every few hours, suddenly become obvious when listening to a single CD.
Nickleback, for instance, was a band whose songs I had heard, but until I listened to the entire CD I hadn’t appreciated the musicality they bring to a hard rock/metal esthetic. Who knew?
Applecare surprised me in a good way
So I wasn’t excited about laying about another $100+ for a new Airport Express, when a friend asked me if I had Applecare on my MacBook. No, I hadn’t planned to get it for another few months.
If you had it, your Airport Express would be covered, he said. WTF, I said, I’ve had this for years, and they’d fix it anyway?
Yup.
So I ordered Applecare from my favorite APP retailer LA Computer (great service and prices) and registered when I got and called in right away.
It took a couple of hours on the phone and escalating to a Tier 2 rep to convince them the little brute was well and truly broken, but once it was clear, he cheerfully ordered me a new Airport Express, with overnight delivery.
I’m a fan anyway, but this impressed even cynical me. A three year old product replaced! Cool!
And I got to get reacquainted with the magic of CDs. Maybe I’ll play them more often now.
Comments welcome, of course. Tell me about a CD you’ve listened to recently, all the way through.
This is why I liked my empeg before it got stolen: It had ‘album shuffle’ mode where it would randomly pick an album to play the whole way through before choosing another random album. I’m hoping amaroK can do something similar though I haven’t tried to do so yet.
The last “CD” I listened to all of the way through was Venus Hum’s The Colors in the Wheel. I put CD in quotes because I first ripped the CD to .flac files Sound Juicer before listening to it. But, I did listen to it from start to finish, in order. I copied all of my CDs to a harddrive in .flac files, but I still prefer to listen to entire albums at a time rather than any shuffling. Sometimes I use amaroK to play music, but often I will just use a CLI player by going to the directory in question and typing “mplayer *”. I’ve never really used iTunes, because I’m just in the habit of doing it in the same way I’ve been doing it since before I got an OSX machine.