A Tiger In My Tank

Day 117: Some of my readers may be old enough to remember the Exxon commercials and "Put a tiger in your tank," and some may even remember the joke which was spawned by the adverts:

Question: How do you put a tiger in your tank?

Answer: First you put his back paws in. Then you put his front paws in. Then you put his head in. And then you kick him in the gas hole.

Well, I discovered the tiger in my tank today. I'd gone out for a six-mile walk, but accidentally set the counter for a distance of three miles. I didn't notice until the male voice I'd chosen told me I'd gone halfway, but I said "What the heck, he'll tell me when I've gone three miles and then I'll just turn around. Not a problem." You can't reset a workout midstream on the Nano, but it keeps a record even if you exceed your goal. It does allow you to check your pace without pausing the workout, though, and when I checked at two miles, it told me I was pulling something just under a 14-minute mile. At the end of my intended six-mile workout, I'd maintained a pace of 14'49".

That was when I discovered the tiger in the tank. After the selected voice had given me the statistics, a new voice said, "Congratulations! This is Tiger Woods. You've just completed your fastest mile."

Never Easy

Day 105: It's never easy, the combination of Crow and tech. After spending half an hour figuring out how to transfer songs to my new iPod, I couldn't get them to play. The on-line manual was unreadable, printed so small that it couldn't be seen, and if you zoomed in, the letters fragmented. The cute little leaflet in the box was exceptionally uninformative: "this is your home key...here's where the headphones go...plug the lightning connector in here." Thank you, I'd rather not plug anything into a connection with lightning! Apple's parts names are as skewed as their color perception. This iPod is "yellow." I poked all the screen icons and failed to find anything adjustable, and it was only by accident that my fingers encountered the tiny ridges on the toggleable volume control.

Okay, that hurdle crossed, let's see if we can organize music into playlists. Another hour of wasted time later, I popped a note off to Kevin and asked him to stop by on his way home from work. He's good with this sort of thing. Yep, there was a button I'd missed. He showed me how to set up playlists and I did so gleefully. Then I synchronized the device. The playlists failed to transfer.

Going out for my second walk of the day, I discovered I'd accidentally loaded fifty or so Christmas songs onto the device. It's a little jarring to hear "Good King Wenceslaus" in between "Click Go the Shears" and "The Man from Snowy River," likewise "O Holy Night" doesn't quite fit with "Haul Away for Rosie." Yeah, there's work to be done here. I just wish somebody would print...PRINT, I say!...a set of clear instructions for us old fogeys who don't find technology intuitive.