NEW USED TOY

To the few people who kept coming back here to check for new posts, I offer my apologies profusely. I have been distracted by a new toy - a used Zire 71 that I got for half a song to replace my dead Palm M100. I wished I could revive my M100 because of its great sentimental value. Alas, technology can be so heartless as well as unforgiving.

The Zire 71 came with a 256 MB SD card. So I surfed the web and downloaded an MP3 player. Ijun even passed me a cracked version, just for experiment, mind you. I set up everything and as suggested, used Windows Media Player to transfer files to the handheld. I stayed up until 2 am and yet the files did not get transferred. I woke up early Tuesday morning and tried again. My plan was to listen to MP3 while invigilating the exam at 2 pm. No MP3 files got transferred.

I filled my time in the exam hall trying to understand "Bejewelled". After I gave up, I read a Mary Higgins Clark's novel until I was interuppted by my students trying to con me into giving them hints on how to answer the questions and later asking for extra writing papers or asking for a punch. They needed to make holes in their answer paper.

When I got back home, I was in a calmer mood and mulled the problem of the non-communicative Zire. I found out how to remove the SD Card. I also found out that it has a switch. I remembered the old floppies with the write-enable slide switch. I slid the switch on the card the other way and re-installed and tried transferring. First I used the Palm Quick Install software to move the files directly to the expansion card. It was slow but it worked! First song transferred was Eagle's "Hotel California". Then I tried "syncing" from Windows Media Player. It is faster there.

From there on, I happily mulled over the next problem. I have to choose only 200 MB of music from my 16 GB of music collection. That is a more difficult task. Anyone has a used 1 GB SD or MMC card?