I Could Write a Book on Losing My Mind

Take a look at my picture, to the right. Do I look anything like Ingrid Bergman? Apparently, Car-X thinks so because they have been desperately trying all summer to drive me out of my mind, and now emusic has jumped into the game. Here's the deal:

A few years ago, I worked at an agency in Lincoln Park. I routinely parked my car on the street behind the building, which was lined with townhomes that I would conservatively estimate started at $5 million. As you would expect, the surrounding area was pretty nice, although there were a few shadier blocks in the area, mostly around the el tracks, which tends to be the case in any neighborhood the el runs through. However, the immediate area where I parked my car was very nice, nannies would push strollers down the sidewalk, at least 3 or 4 homes on any day would have a lawn crew doing work, the street was lined with BMW and Lexus SUV's, you get the picture. Well, one afternoon I left the office to go do a home visit (I was a travelling social worker that visited home-bound people who had personal care workers paid for by the state). I got into my car, pulled out, and almost plowed into the line of cars still parked there. My car seriously pulled to the right. I slammed on the brake, grabbed ahold of the wheel, and tried again, and it still pulled strongly to the right. I pulled back over, got out, walked around the car, and discovered that my front passenger tire was completely flat. There was Car-X about half a mile away, and I figured it would be quicker to carefully drive there than to wait for a tow-truck to come and take me the half-mile. So, I drove VERY SLOWLY to Car-X where they took a look and informed me that the tire had been slashed, which totally blew my mind. In the middle of Lincoln Park, in the middle of the day, who would randomly slash a tire, and how could they not be seen doing it? We certainly weren't in the middle of the ghetto. So, I got a new tire put on and went on my way. A couple years went by, and I no longer work at that agency, I now work in Park Ridge. Well, somewhere around February or March of this year, I head out to my car one morning and notice that the front passenger tire, the new one, was a little low. I suspected maybe it was the record cold weather, but none of the other tires were low. I stopped at a gas station on the way home that night and pumped it up and thought nothing else of it until about a week later, I noticed it was low again. I pumped it up that afternoon, and about a week later, it was low again. There is a Car-X about a mile and a half from my new job, so I took it there, and they said they were unable to find anything wrong with it and suggested I take it back to the Car-X that sold me the tire, which is so much easier said than done. They pumped it up for me and I stopped by Target and bought a $15 cigarette lighter-powered air pump, which I used about once a week for the next month or so to pump up the tire, it was more convenient than stopping at the gas station every time and having to scrape up quarters for the air pump. After a few weeks of this, I finally had a meeting at our downtown office one afternoon. It wrapped up arond 4, so I snuck out and drove back to the Car-X by my old agency. They took a look at it, and found a nail that had somehow embedded itself on the inside of the tire and was in pretty deep, and could have been easy to miss the first time around. They removed it, patched it, pumped up the tire, didn't charge me, and I went on my way, happy that I had gotten this taken care of. Well, about 5 days later, the tire was low again. I pumped it up every 5-6 days for another few weeks and then was lucky enough to be back at the downtown office for another meeting (in case you're wondering why I didn't take it in earlier, this particular Car-X, again, located in Lincoln Park near Ashland and Fullerton is only open Monday through Friday from 7 am to 6:30 pm and Saturdays from 7 am to 3:30 pm, not particularly helpful when I work in Park Ridge and see clients most of the day on Saturday). Afterwards I went back, they took another look and said they couldn't find anything. They pumped it up, still didn't charge me, and I went on my way. Three weeks later, I had pumped it up another 3 times and was downtown again. Once again, I stopped by Car-X, they again said they couldn't find anything, but replaced the valve stint, didn't charge me but looked at my like they were considering calling the guys in white coats, and I was on my way. That was early August, and now, by the end of September I'm down to pumping it up every 3-4 days. Since I'm going to Europe for 10 days in mid-October, I decided that I don't want it to completely lose air the first few days I'm gone and then rest on the rim for another week before I get back, and it would be worth it just to get a new tire. I want the same Car-X to do it so I can bitch at them and hopefully at least get a discount if not a free tire, which I think is why they're claiming they can never find anything, they want me to go somewhere else to get it done. So, yesterday, I had a morning meeting downtown, and I told my boss that I was going to get this taken care of afterwards and then head back to Park Ridge. The meeting ended around 11 and off I went, it's only about a 15 minute drive from our office at Jackson & Halsted to the Car-X in non-rush hour. I got there and there were no empty parking spots in their lot, which was not a good sign. I parked in the middle, crossed my fingers that all the cars had been worked on the day before and were just waiting to be picked up while at the same time noticing that all the service bays were occupied, and went in. I told the guy (a different guy than the one who was there the previous 3 times) that I wanted a new tire, an oil change, and need a new O2 sensor (that was another drama with my car earlier this summer). He said he'd need the car for the rest of the day. That was impossible since I had to get back to Park Ridge, which would take until about 7:00 pm on public transportation. I said I couldn't do that and he said I could drop the car off in the morning. Yes, that will make all the difference because overnight there will be a miracle breakthrough in Star Trek-style transport technology and I can instantaneously get to Park Ridge from Lincoln Park instead of spending 5-6 hours each way on Public Transportation. I said I'd think about it and left. It could be do-able, but my companion had just flown to New York for 2 days, so I couldn't even have him follow me there the next morning, drop it off, and then take his car to work, and then drive both of us back the next morning to pick it up. The tire was really low, because I wanted them to see it, so I opened the trunk there in the middle of their parking lot, pulled out the air pump and pumped it up right there, then climbed in and sped off in a huff. I realized a little later though that I'm going to be back downtown all day next Wednesday, so I actually can stop there on my way to drop it off, take the bus, which should only take about another 45 minutes from there, and then take the bus back at the end of the day, which should get me there minutes before 6:30 and pick it up, so then I was a little happier. Still, I had wanted to finally get it taken care of yesterday, in the next week, at the rate it's now losing air, I'll probably have to pump the tire up 2 more times. Now, how does emusic play into this you ask?

Well, as I mentioned earlier, after I got High Spirits, I started on The Boys From Syracuse (the 1997 Encores Cast). My downloads refreshed on the 19th, and I hooked up my computer to get the rest of them. Now, the way I go about this is already somewhat complicated. We don't have broadband at home, for a variety of reasons, but mostly we're waiting for the association to finally follow through on a proposal they brought up about a year ago to wire the entire building for it and build it into the monthly assessment. We don't want to get locked into a contract with someone else then end up paying a second time in the form of the monthly assessment. However, I can use my kick-ass cell phone (T-Mobile's MDA) as a modem, which isn't as fast as broadband, but is much faster than dial-up, so it's a good compromise. I'm on the unlimited data plan, so I can download as many songs as I want. The only catch is that it only works with XP. My desktop computer is still Windows 98SE (a far superior operating system if you ask me, which Microsoft certainly did not). My laptop has XP though, so I have the cell phone set up to work as a modem on that one. The only problem is the Gateway laptop is a piece of crap, but I'm still paying it off, so I don't want to get another one yet. I'm not sure if it's so awful because Gateway makes shit computers or because XP is pure crap, or some combination of the two. Either way, at this point I really only use it for browsing the internet, I do everything else, including copying CD's on my desktop, and only use the laptop as I may have mentioned in an earlier post as a second try when scratched CD's from the library don't copy perfectly on the desktop. Part of the problem with the laptop now is that the battery is pretty much dead, so I can only use it plugged in and it takes longer to start up. Still, it saves time downloading from emusic. When I first installed emusic, it was a very quick download, less than 1 GB, and installed quickly. So, last Wednesday, I just wanted to download the last 5 songs I needed to complete TBFS. I logged in, selected track 16 to download, and got a message stating that the downloader software had been updated and I needed to download and install the update before I could download my song. I was so not in the mood, I just wanted to get my 5 songs, put the computer away, and call it a day. So, I clicked on "Download Now," and the download started. It was just over 3 GB so it took about 20 minutes to download it and another 5 or so to get it fully installed. I hate it. The old one was better. This one now fully runs the emusic site as a virtual machine, similar to iTunes or Rhapsody, which slows it down already just searching for music. You can then toggle between the store and the download manager. However, the look of the manager is now different and less useful. The old one would keep a running count of how much of the file had downloaded as well as the progress bar (ie, x out of xxx bytes downloaded) so you could see the progress. The new one lists not only the track name, but the album, artist, track number, which is redundant information because you can just toggle back to the store and see it, and in order to make room for all this, ditched the running count of the downloaded bytes and only has the progress bar. So, about half an hour after I first clicked on track 16, it finally started downloading. I downloaded the rest of the tracks, copied the full album onto my flash drive, and took it over to my desktop where I converted all of them from large VBR files to 96 kbps CBR files (I know there's supposed to be a degredation of quality the lower you go, but on an mp3 player with earbud headphones or an FM transmitter to a car stereo, there's little difference between 96 and 128 or even 160 kbps, so I can get more files on the hard drive with almost no noticeable difference, at least to my ears) and put them on my mp3 player. Now, I know I had said my next acquisition was going to be Anna Karenina. However, on Monday, amazon.com opened an online music store (amazonmp3.com) which, like emusic, sells DRM free mp3 files. I took a look, and while they don't have Grey Gardens or Seesaw (although a library by my parents' has Grey Gardens so some weekend when I go out there I'll take the laptop, stop by the library, grab the CD, set up shop in a corner somewhere by an outlet, and make the copy, hopefully before a librarian walks by, and Seesaw may just have to end up on my Christmas list, although one of the unavailable songs has now been added on emusic so maybe the other 2 will follow sometime soon), they did have the 1995 Pal Joey with Patti and Bebe, and they had all the tracks, including the one that emusic for some reason doesn't have. So, I figured I would buy that one track, and then download the other 18 from emusic, and then next week use my last 7 tracks to start Anna K., and then the downloads will refresh Octobe 19, which is the day I leave for Europe, so in the morning I can download the rest of Anna K. and maybe Ben Franklin in Paris, and listen to those on the plane (we leave around 4:30 so I should have time if I start around 8 or so in the morning). I had no problem getting the track from Amazon and it played fine (I was so worried it would end up like most of buymusic.com's tracks, either turning out to be the wrong track when you opened the file or only contain half the song). Then I opened up the new emusic software, pulled up Pal Joey, and made the mistake of clicking on "Download All" instead of doing them individually. The old emusic downloader limited itself to downloading tracks 1 at a time. Now, when you download two tracks at a time, you'd think that it would take twice as long to get them both. For example, it takes on average, about 5 minutes to get a song when you download it alone. You would think if you downloaded 2 songs at a time, they would both split the bandwidth and take 10 minutes to both download, which is the same amount of time it would take if you downloaded them individually one after the other. Logically, you would think that if you downloaded three at a time, it would take 15 minutes to get all three. This is not how it works. The increase in time is geometric. While it takes about 5 minutes to get one song, if you downloaded 2 at a time, it takes about 15-20 minutes to get them both, if you download 3 it takes about 45 minutes. It's always better to just download them one at a time, which the old downloaded seemed to understand. Well, as soon as I clicked "Download All," the new downloader queued them all up, and immediately started on 4 of them. I could not figure out how to limit the downloads to one at a time like you can with buymusic.com (one of the few good things I can say about them), and it took almost 4 hours to get the 18 tracks, it was just after 11:00 pm when it finally concluded. I transfered them, along with the one from amazon, onto my flash drive, turned off and put away the laptop, and took the drive to the desktop. Even though it was late, I wanted to get them onto a CD to listen to in the car this morning, along with a couple CD's I got from the library the day before and needed to listen to to make sure they copied ok. I started the conversion process, and when it got the 5th track, I got a message stating that "MMJB has committed an illegal act and needs to close." I let it close and figured that maybe the track had pasted onto a bad section of drive. So, I copied it off of the flash drive into another folder on the hard drive and tried again converting the file from there, and again, it encountered an error and shut down. I opened the folder and clicked on file 5, and the info that pops up on the left side of the folder said the file size was 0 KB. I clicked on all the files and discovered that file 6 was also 0 KB although all the others looked ok. So, being the anal neurotic I am, I knew I wouldn't sleep if I left it there even though it was now about 11:30. I had to pull the laptop back out, plug it in, start it up, plugged in the cell phone, and the cell phone for some reason did not register. It kept giving me an error, so I did a soft reset of the phone, wasting more time, and then it still wouldn't start, so I rebooted the computer. This time it recognized the phone when I plugged it in and connected again to emusic (another annoying thing with the new downloader/store combo is that it takes about 3-4 minutes from when you first click on it for it to open up, connect to the store, and display the home page, more time wasted). I cleared the completed files, deleted tracks 5 and 6 out of their folder on the hard drive, and clicked on Download Now just for track 5. Buymusic sometimes has a similar error where if too many songs start downloading at once, it will just drop one but claim that it successfully finished, and then, unlike emusic where you can re-download songs as many times as you want, you have to email customer service and wait for them to reset your license, and I hoped that that was all that happened here. It seemed so as track 5 started downloading, but after about 30 seconds, my cell phone dropped the connection. I had to reconnect, wasting more time, and then resume the download. It was also a large file (about a 4 and a half minute song) so it took forever. However, I tested it and this time it gave me a file size and played when I opened it with winamp. I got track 6, taking another 5 minutes or so, it was a shorter song, put them on my flash drive, and pasted them over the empty files on the hard drive on my desktop. They all converted successfully, so I threw in a blank disc, started the burn process, put the laptop away again, then packed the finished disc in my briefcase, shut down the desktop, and went to bed, at about 12:30 am. It took over 5 hours to get one CD's worth of music, fucking ridiculous. I'm just going to have to remember, if I can't find away to limit simultaneous downloads, to just not click "Download All" and just download them individually. I want the old downloader back. So, given it's position on the disc, I should start hearing it during my afternoon commute home tomorrow (I heard ALW's Requiem this morning and started on Haydn's The Seasons, which I just heard Music of the Baroque play last week. I then have The Wizard of Oz movie soundtrack, you'd think I would have gotten that when I was like 8 but better late than never, and then it will get to Pal Joey). Next week I'll get the first 7 tracks of Anna Karenina and then on October 19th I can get the rest and then take a long relaxing vacation out of the country to get over the stress of it all. I swear, it's time for a rest cure, especially after only getting 5 hours of sleep last night. At least I know Patti and Bebe will have been worth it.