Well I thought I'd take a moment to update my journal and pass on feelings about my new Sony NW-E507.


I. Appearances 9/10:
First off... appearances. This thing looks pretty bitchin. It's very slick and has a quasi-futuristic looking metallic finish to it. It appears to almost be metal (similar to Oakley style sunglasses) until the 3 Line OLED is activated. The OLED display is bright... you should see the thing in the dark. BUT be forewarned.. the display is hard to read under say... a texas sun. It's bright as all hell until you're under something brighter. This isn't so much the fault of the OLED display but rather because of the cool metallic finish. Now.. I believe that the E507 is the only one with this heavy metallic finish of all the NW's from Sony... but it's the (as of 06/2005) top of the line network walkman in the E series. This issue does not happen as frequently as one might fear and is only a minor irritation at worst.
The controls are pretty slick looking too. The three smaller buttons are a bit difficult to get used to as you have to basically push the meat of your finger onto them to get them to depress. Once you've gotten used to it, it's very simple to navigate through the search/menu/display and to switch over to the devices FM band reciever. The volume, play/pause buttons and the turn knob look pretty slick as well. If you're looking at the image above you're probably wondering which third smaller button im referring to. On the back is a smaller button for changing the customized sound settings (normal, 1 and 2) which allow you to customize the amount of bass and treble, and it also serves to set the repeat function.
The backside is pretty plain metallic looking (non-reflective) not much to talk about here except that it has a place for a lanyard. This is very handy.. if you've got a lanyard. The device instead comes with a weak belt clip.. but more of that when I go over the accessories. The back is home of that third smaller button and another pen hole or e-tool (paperclip) hole to reset the entire devices settings etc. which incidentally does not delete for format the flash portion of the device.
If you look at the image you can see where the twist style control knob at the top is located. What you can't see is that opposite this is the rubberized cover hiding the proprietary style plug for the USB cable that comes with the device. The hinge is pretty effective on this rubberized flap but does cause me concern whenever I open it... it seems flimsy and is definately not a part that you'd want to lose and wind up getting dirt/dust/etc into the small plug.. besides.. it'd have a gaping maw at the bottom.. and we can't have that on our slick mp3 player... pfft.
The device also has five displays for the OLED that you can choose from. The default is the Group/Album/Song display including how much time you've gone through on the current track, the sound setting (that I referred to earlier), the repeat mode and the battery power left in the device. The other displays include 'Property' which shows what you're last search section was under the number of groups and files, and the property of the last music file you were listening or are currently listening to (ie kbps and MP3 or ATRAC). The next display is 'Lap Meter' It shows the total time of music you have on your collection and how far you are through it. This is displayed in a vertical fashion as opposed to horizontal like the others, which would look good if hung from a lanyard but doesn't really provide too much information. The next display is 'Clock' which shows the time in 24 hour format (you can't change this to 12 hour like us americans use - GRRR) and this displays the time and date and a little throbbing bump for seconds. The last and one of my favorites but totally worthless is the 'Bubbles' display, which just shows bubbles floating up in a vertical screen. Now.. it would be really cool if it was reactive to the bass or the beat or something but it's just an animation on a loop. Still looks really cool though. This all comes together to give a pretty damn neat looking little mp3 player... definately cool to show off and not something you'd want to hide inside your shirt while you're working out or jogging.
Appearance-wise Id have to give the NW-E507 a 9/10 It looks great all around but that you cant see the display in bright light or have a way to adjust the brightness so you -could- see it in bright light... knocks it down a point.

II. Functionality 8/10:
Ease of Use. Next I'm just going to go over the functionality of the device itself... not the software. The software, SonicStage, as I'll talk about a bit later.. is a total piece of junk and is what hurts this device the most. Once you've actually gotten your music on the device, finding it and playing it is extremely easy. There are a couple of confusing things about it though. Using the search feature of the device allows you to search by All Tracks, Artist, Album and Group. The search by all tracks is pretty much just what it says, it gives you a list of all the track names in alphabetical order. Very easy to use but somewhat time consuming. By artist is pretty simple as well. It gives you a list of all the artists and their songs beyond that as does album. Group is really where its at though. I'd highly suggest to anyone purchasing this device to organize all the songs by group if you can. Searching by group is likely to be the easiest way to do it because it give you more control. If you're like me you've been too lazy to go through and correct all the tags on your mp3's. The E507 get's all the track information from the tags attached to your music so if these dont match exactly right then you'll end up with redundant album/artist file hierarchy listings. If you use group and search by group then you've defined where your music lives.
Ok.. so the confusing bits. When you're listing you have three levels of the knob you can use. Pressed all the way in, the device is on hold- none of the buttons have any effect. This is nice when you're jogging or just moving around alot. Keep the volume from changing when your keys rest on them or if you're stretching and such. When you pull it out at the first level you're skipping by track. If you pull it out all the way you search by group (this is where the whole group thing comes in handy). The confusing part is skipping by track. The way the device behaves is determined by how you last searched for songs. Say you just want to listen to one album or group and you put the device on random. The only way to keep it on the same group or album or artist is to search for that particular group, album or artist and select one of the songs out of it. If you last search for all tracks the random play can take you through 'all tracks' on your device. So say for instance you have three albums or groups in your device: Bob Marley, Apollo 440 and some Bach. Let's say these are all groups.. that way you can have multiple albums in there and use the knob to get to them pretty easily. So.. you're in a classical mood, so you need to go to the search menu, search by group and then choose Bach and pick any particular song that you'd like to start out with. This keeps you in the bach group whlie you're working out and ensures that the next track it randomly cuts to is also going to be Bach. Now.. say you just got this... and you desire to just listen to J.S. Bach but you're new to the device.. so you search by all tracks and choose one of your favorites.. at the end of the track you might wind up listening to some apollo440 or Exudus. Not exactly what you were looking for. Ok.. so say you're driving around and you've got your old tape deck and an adapter ready to go and you just want to listen to some random songs... well you're going to be stuck with Bach until you search again and search under all tracks. Once you've done this the device knows its ok to move around the entire collection of music on the device. So it's not too confusing but it can be a tad bit annoying the first time you run through it.
In any case once you've familiarized yourself with how the file structures are setup on the device and the control knob you use to navigate it.. it's REALLY easy... akin to the iPod but a bit more difficult because of the controls.
So for funcationality of the device itself I'd have to give it an 8/10.

III. Accessories 6/10:
Oh man... I had a kind of difficult time deciding what exactly I should rate this. The device comes with a few things.. the quality of which and usability of which are not so great. First off is the basic USB cable. The cable seems to be of good quality.. not the greatest... but the cable shouldn't be moving around much anyway so this is allright. That and I because of the proprietary connector on the end of it I fear what it would cost to replace. It's pretty.. OK though.. so I'll leave it at that. It does it's job.
The belt clip. This thing is a piece of trash. It's ok.. but from my experiences and from other reviews I've read I wouldn't trust your $200 mp3 player/fm reciever to this thing. It's plastic, its a clip, it's cheap... unworthy for a device like this. Look for a good lanyard.. much more dependable. I'm disappointed that it didn't come with something sturdier than this, of the times I've trusted it, it has come unclipped and caught on the headphone cable. Luckily it's light enough to keep it from slamming to the ground. I think you could trust it if you clipped it to the INSIDE of your pocket, but then you can't show off your NW-E507.. where's the fun with that? Let alone you lost any kind of easy access to the buttons and controls.
The headphones. Ok.. this is kinda wierd. The headphones to begin with are somewhat painful to use for me they arent like the iPod ear phones.. perhaps if Sony included little pads for the headphones they'd be a bit more comfortable. As they are.. they become painful after a half hour of use unless you can get them turned around in such a way as to where they dont.. but then they threaten to fall out. The sound qaulity of them is pretty nice.. picks up bass and treble quite well... but if they're going to make your ears bleed what difference does it make? Here's the other part.. I'm torn on this as well. The headphones come with REALLY REALLY short cable. This is nice if you have the device clipped to your shoulder or possibly on an armband (if sony ever gets off their ass and produces on for the E507.. HEAR ME SONY! GET OFF YER ASS AND MAKE ME AN ARMBAND BICHES!) but other than that it's pretty damn short. It's also one of those things where the left headphone has a really really short cable and the right has a longer one.. meaning if you want to get your stereo channels right then you're stuck with the cord coming up left side.. which is fine if you're right handed.. so you can reach over to your left shoulder or whatever and change things... but if you're left handed... you'll have to use your other hand to do it which may very well be akward for you. There is a headphone extension that comes with the device which hypothetically should make the cord as long as others but it still leaves me feeling rather large and oafish, perhaps the extension was designed for shorter people in a different country... hrm... would make sense.
Lastly is the pouch. The pouch is nice enough but it's not going to stand the test of time in any case. It's soft enough to use to polish any smudges off your device but it's too thin. I'm thinking about buying an extra one of those polish pouches that you can get anywhere they sell Oakleys and such.


Incomplete - to finish veru soon.

OK then.. last thing was on the Google Desktop Search. I did use it for awhile.. but it pissed me off.. it needs to have a way to differentiate mail clients.. I only wanted to index the mail from one of my clients not any others that might be on my machine.. so that part bites.. and the folders you tell it to ignore don't really work either so....
GDS - 2/5. I uninstalled it.
OK.. so Korea has found away to clone embryonic stem cells. It's awesome.. and they've found a way to do it efficiently. So... someone put the words clone and embryonic stem cells in one sentence and our idiot fundamentalist president flips out and says any bill that comes close to allowing for new lines of stems cells, he'll veto. Why? Because he believes that cloning human beings is immoral. It's illegal to clone human beings in Korea BTW... but I guess like in so many other instances... Dubyas intelligence group has failed him again.
Also.. I love how fundamentalists liken stem cell research with abortion. Because obviously, any stem cells that are harvested would have become people at some point. Never would they have been flushed or thrown away in the toilet. Such foolishness.
Why does our fearless leader want to condem so many people to diseases that could be cured? Well.. respect for life doesn't truly appear to be part of his agenda. Perhaps that explains it. Got to protect the institution of marriage... to busy with that to cure so many people of dibilitating disease. Pfft.
It's all good. He'll be remembered for this when places like Korea become well developed and extremely wealthy as they lead the world in the medical industry. Millions of people from around the globe traveling there to have their diseases cured. Intelligent people moving there because of the lack of a skewed moral majority. All that money bleeding out of the United States... just because of misplaced and underdeveloped morals and ethics.
You know.. it's said that the male forebrain takes longer to develop than the female. But I think I've seen that it's development can cease completely... somewhere around the age of FRAT BOY.
How long will these neo-conservatives be in power?
::shudder::

ShaBot

Date:	2005-03-07 21:55
Subject:	Google Desktop Search Engine....
Security:	Public
Mood:	drained

Ok.. im taking the plunge. I'm going to install the google desktop search engine. I played with it at work and frankly... im pretty impressed. Took a little while to index.. but all the same. Should be pretty phat. Although I wish you could be more selective about what it indexes. I just want media and mail. Not much need for it to index system files and what not. ::shrug::
We shall see.
More later.
Shabot.

Date:	2005-02-22 12:57
Subject:	Sweet.. new version of Semagic...
Security:	Public
Mood:	annoyed

Ok.. so let's try out this new version.. looks good so far.
Allright.. so.. I'll try to recap I guess.. I've got a few minutes.
Las Vegas.. it was pretty sweet... I really enjoyed seeing my uncle James... haven't for awhlie. Great guy.. funny.. glad to have him as family. My parents actually got me and Susannah our own room at the Bellagio. They are still working on portions of it but it was still really nice. We had our own big tub and glass walled standing shower. Automated window screens and drapes... it was nice.. very nice. My uncle made a deep fried turkey.. which was -just- spicy enough... good stuff... lots of other goodies. We went to Mandalay Bay shark reef thingy.. that was pretty slick... glass walls and ceilings and floors... and... lot's of sharks (whodathunk?). Oh.. and we had second row seats for "O", a Cirque de Solei show.. oh man.. that was incredible. The entire stage was made of a sequence of moving floors underwater.. at any one point it could be a full stage or have sections that were just water.. it was incredible... very very surreal. We had a bit of rough weather on the flight there... alot of turbulance.. and then the flight back was just... almost nightmarish. I hate phoenix airport... whatever the hell it's called. The tower had us take off too quickly behind an airbus and we hit their wake on our take off... Susannah and I were right next to the windows and the whole plane shook and pitched almost enough to cause our starboard wing to drag accross the runway. That could have been pretty bad... luckily it didnt happen.
Ok.. next... Half Life 2. Wow. Kick ass. Steam can suck a cock.. but valve can make a bad ass game. The death match is great too. But the game.. oh man.. if Valve would come out with little sidequests.. like... little 15-20 hour games every three months for like $30.. they'd totally get my money. And that should be totally do-able with steam and such. I'm already eyeing a couple of pretty sweet looking mods: Blackmesa: Source and City 13. Black mesa source is a complete redo of HL1 using the HL2 engine... a bunch of people were pissed at the quality of HL:Source so they decided to do it right... can't wait for that to come out. Then you've got City 13 which takes place -after- HL2, since you've taken out city 17 and doc breen and cut off the head of the combine forces it's not time for the citizens to stand up and get rid of what's left of the combine forces. Sounds pretty cool.. the site is pretty detailed in the story and description.
Well I didn't finish my story for Susannah for X-Mas.. I'm pretty pissed off about this.. I actually wound up losing a HUGE.. MASSIVE chunk of what I'd been working on and pretty much I'm starting from scratch again. I'm still working on it but it's slow. I really need to get back into my writing. Badly. I'm applying for transfer into UT for the fall.. we'll see how that goes. Need to re-write a couple of essays as the ones I was originally instructed to write were apparently INCORRECT. Thank you so much... so now i need to write two completely different essays... anyway.. besides the point.
Christmas living with Susannah was awesome. She made me a painting (painted me a painting?) for Christmas.. it's really gorgeous... a beautiful piece.. I haven't gotten a good picture of it yet but I will and I'll post it up here.
Ok... lunch is ready... mm... stoufers meatloaf and mashed potatos... man.. wish I had some pepper.
*sigh*
The whole poor thing.. yeah... still sucks. I just love how expendable cash reserves per person has dropped steadily over the past thirty years and even more quickly than average over the past 4-5 years (thank you Dubya!-again.. thank you fucking bible thumpers for helping bring about your armegeddon.. I hope you fail to survive as dictated by Darwin... for surely you are -not- the fittest... not the fittest to vote anyway.. and the president you've chosen does in fact represent you - he is not fit to rule). In the fifties you could work at a gas station and still afford to buy your own home. What the fuck happened?
Bastages.
Lunch time for me... more later.

ShaBot

Date:	2005-02-22 12:22
Subject:	Just checking...
Security:	Public
Mood:	apathetic

Just checking in.. haven't posted in quite some time. Figured I'd go ahead and do so.
Nothing much new.

Date:	2004-11-12 16:36
Subject:	Yay.. the weekend!
Security:	Public
Mood:	bored

Sweet weekend... ohhhh... sweet sweet weekend. This week has lasted forever... I'll be glad to see it go. Anyway.... supposed to do some fun things at home for the weekend.. to poor to go out and do much ): Which kinda sucks.. but you do what you can. Me and Susannah were thinking about going camping at Pedernalis but it's supposed to rain alot.. Maybe next weekend... weekend before we go to Las Vegas for Thanksgiving... that should be interesting. Maybe even some fun. I'd like to go camping though before it gets what we call in Texas... freakin' freezing. Or 40F. Hehe... The same folk who predicted we'd have a mild summer... which we did.. also predicted that we'd have a cold winter with spikes of mini-freezes... so we'll see how consistant "they" can be. Looking forward to these cold months. Nothing like free air conditioning.
T-Minus two hours till the weekend starts for me.
two hours.... 1 hour 59 minutes.... COMEON! I need a remote to fast forward through this crap sometimes...
I think I'm going to start writing a continued short story here but not sure where to start. Need to get my juices flowing again. A journal is a good place to start. I miss the ink days... my hand just gets too cramped these days... I used to have to write on whatever I could find laying around and always had one of my favorite pilots (black) in my pocket at all times. *sigh* Typing is just so much faster... and legible to boot :) I'm working on a small project for Susannah's christmas present... but it's been moving slow. I'm hoping these journals will help speed things up a bit.
Anyway... back to work for now. Maybe I'll get some fiction in this weekend.

Date:	2004-11-12 12:54
Subject:	MMmmm... lunch...
Security:	Public
Mood:	full

Just ate lunch.. working on a friggin pirate slot machine game.. Yarr! I'm sleepy... just waiting for the weekend... Half-life two is coming out soon.. that should kick asssss even on my 1.5ghz machine.. I dont give a damn biches! Yeah... so Ashcroft leaves (yay) and he get's replaced with a Rice and Harvard graduate... who you would think is educated in the field of ethics.. but apparently he must have skipped out on those classes.. WHOOPS! So.. he completely ignores the whole Geneva conventions.. .(Geneva what?) and was involved in representing folks from Enron during that fiasco. This is some great material... things are really changing for the better in this country!! I keep thinking I'd like to move.. but.. if we all did that.. who would protect us from the bible thumping, homophobic, creationist, sister marrying idiots the next round? God damn evangelists... heh.. theres a touch of irony there. I was thinking the other day.. what ever happened to those sour cherry candies they used to sell at theatres? I haven't seen those for years. ::shrug::
Anyway... back to work.

Date:	2004-11-11 23:03
Subject:	Quickie..
Security:	Public
Mood:	blah

Ok.. well just a quick entry here... time to play a little Evil Genius but before that.. I just thought that my personal pic came out pretty sweet with a bit of GIMPing around and though it looks like a pic of me with some blotter on the right side of the frame it actually (believe it or not) isn't. So here's a link to the whole thing.
G'night.

ShaBot

Date:	2004-11-11 14:00
Subject:	Rar.
Security:	Public
Mood:	Merrr!

Ok.. getting my livejournal together. I feel like a tremendous nerd doing this... a subject of ridicule.. but.. what the hell. I actually started this livejournal account a long time ago but just decided to go ahead and start posting after reading my buddy syahs weblog out of sheer boredom as I wait for test templates to build on this damn game im testing. I use the term "game" in the loosest sense of the word as its actually just a piece of slot machine software. Where game != Max Bet + Play (stare.... stare) Max Bet + Play... etc etc... So yeah.. back to why I guess I decided to start posting. You can upload your gpg pub key. <-- That's what did it. I was like.. damn. That's cool. Another verification tool.
"Well.. my pub key is -also- on my livejournal blog." Not a great way to pick up chicks... but I'm taken care of in that department anyway.
Ok.. going to keep my initial post short for the time being. I'll probably post more today. The paid for subscription is kinda tempting.. well not the paying for it.. but the ability to email your journals in. ::shrug::

Latah.
ShaBot