Third Saturday in a row...

This could get to be a habit.

Huntur, her friend Camille, and Mathew came over and spent the better part of the day with Galina and me. The girls spent almost all of their time with Hana and her kittens, which came into this world a couple of weeks ago, and who got quite a dose of human socialization today.

Mathew just did his usual job, which was to run his grandma and me ragged. Shiloh, too, if you can believe that.

By late afternoon, Mathew had gotten to the point where he was (mostly) driving my HP tablet, carrying out movements of cards in Spider Solitaire, which appears to have seriously grabbed Galina while she was visiting her sister in Moscow.

Otherwise, it was a pretty unremarkable Saturday (if you don't count the fact that I had no assignments on the plate).

Cheers...

A curious tale of DRM...

I am on the brink of downgrading my Audible membership to a level where I don't end up buying audio books simply because I've got the credits to do so (courtesy of what can be described as a subscription membership).

My first complaint has to do with the medium itself. I've found, first hand, that about the only use I have for an audio book is to listen to a mystery thriller while driving cross-country. It keeps my head clear but doesn't require a high level of concentration. (What passes for music these days just doesn't do it for me.)

My second, has to do with the digital restrictions management (DRM) that Audible (actually Amazon, if memory serves) foists on its customers, along the lines of Apple's iTunes, where devices are "authorized" via the Internet, up to some number deemed reasonable by Audible.

I just spent an interesting half hour trying to (re)-authorize my SanDisk Sansa e260, and kept getting a strange error ("Failed to set activation data to device") for which the Audible site proposed a number of solutions, including formatting the Sansa's drive.

Before I undertook that drastic step, however, I thought a little about what was going on when I connected my Sansa to my VAIO. Specifically, upon plugging the Sansa into a USB port, XP mounted two disk drives (drives I: and M:), where I: turned out to be the (empty) slot on the side of the device, and M: was the drive inside the unit.

The Audible software, however, assumed that the first mounted drive (I:) was the internal drive, and would not write to M:, which was assumed to be the external drive.

So after fooling around with editing my registry (which didn't solve my problem), temporarily killing off my firewall (which didn't solve my problem), and finally making sure Internet Explorer was operable (which didn't solve my problem), I refrained from reformatting my Sansa (which wouldn't have solved my problem), and instead inserted a chip into the side slot of the unit, which the Audible software thereupon recognized as the unit's internal drive, after which the whole authorization thing went off without a hitch.

Now, I just have to remember not to idly remove or replace the chip, else the Sansa'll become "unauthorized" again and the audio books won't play.

I guess some vendors just figure their customers don't have enough to do.

Cheers...