My Life in the Tech World

Just wanted to give an update on my last post about the Vais VML MultiMediaLinQ . Over the last several months I've had a lot of different devices connected to it. I'm happy with the VML but I hadn't found a storage device that worked perfectly. All the mechanical USB drives I connected would occasionally go offline requiring me to unplug the USB cable to reset everything. Turns out those mechanical drives don't like speed bumps or cold weather. Who knew? Even thumb drives sometimes needed a reset (probably not due to speed bumps). The most stable device has been the iPod which never needs a reset but the sound quality is degraded for some music. I'm not clear on technical reasons why that would happen but I suspect there is some issue in the conversion from digital to analog. I should mention that this is only true for my older 60GB iPod. Music from my iPhone sounds perfect. I would use my iPhone but I don't want to use up all the space on the device for mu

Television used to be a bug free zone. Now it's a computer science problem complete with bugs. I was reading David Pogue's review of Google TV . Having recently purchased one I can say that he is spot on with many of his points. In general, the usability of the device needs a lot of work. It's not just surface stuff either, it's deep and pervasive from the controller to the GUI. The pain starts with the initial setup. Why? Because it is exactly like doing a Windows OS install. Several updates and reboots with a full set of wizards to run through. The updates took an hour on my relatively fast Comcast cable connection. I understand the need for updates but why can't the device start up and play while doing the updates in the background? This is a TV right? By adding new unneeded buttons and interface conventions somehow Google managed to make the controller (which is essentially a full keyword and mouse) more complicated than a keyboard and mouse. It's got