i'm looking to kick you swarvey...

I would like, very much, to get in the ol' Delorian and go back in time just a couple of weeks. I would like to go back in time just long enough to stop myself before going into the Best Buy to buy the iPod touch.
As I spoke on with Steve last night, I've entered into an ever expanding reverb loop of suck.
The suck is coupling upon itself. It is like an giant onion of suck with many layers of suck beneath each one which I expose. Like and onion, it makes me cry.
I gave up on the touch. Okay. But, I really, really liked the album art. I wanted to have album art on my Creative Zen. The version of firmware I was running did not allow for changes to album art. I needed to update the firmware and also, because Creative Media Manager runs it in the background, Windows Media Player. No problem. I update both and begin to make updates to album art.
As I mentioned previously, the Zen can only display this art at the size of a small postage stamp or perhaps a single piece of Life cereal. It's underwhelming.
I thought, it was not worth taking the time to do it and put off the continuation of the massive project of updating the art.
Yesterday was the first time I was going to listen to it in the car since the update. As I'm driving along I notice that the sound is not exactly what I was accustomed to. It always had excellent sound. No distortion. Nice warmth. Good volume and fairly deep EQ settings.
Now, not so much. But I can't figure out why.
I blow it off, get home, change, then take it to the gym. I always used it at the gym. I had discovered the sweet spot for volume. The Zen's volume goes from 1 to 25. I thought it should go to 26, just so it was a little louder. In any case, I had found that volume level 19 was perfect. Loud enough so I didn't have to hear the dopey things people say to each other at the gym. "This weight it heavy." But not so loud as to cause bleeding. Very nice.
Gone. 19 is gone. I had the volume all the way to 25 and it was not as loud as 19 had been before.
Not only that, but it had a bad habit of freezing if I scrolled through music too fast. The fix for this had always been, allow any song to play for 4 seconds before switching to the next song. It is not a reasonable fix and Mark said he would have smashed it for not allowing him to switch, switch, switch, switch. The update to the software was supposed to stabilize this issue.
It did not. Not only was the volumed ganked, but it froze when I switched too fast anyway.
When I got home I looked up issues with the version of code and found that Creative, being mindful of my inability to be able to care for myself, enacted the European Volume Cap. Apparently, everyone in Europe is blowing their heads up, so they have laws in place allowing iPods and such to not be any louder than a kitten purring.
I can't roll the code back and I cannot find a hack for it and it keeps freezing and it does not display album art in the way I want.
If I had never bought the touch, I never would have realized how much I liked album art and never would have messed with the Zen. It still froze, but I had come to terms with that.

So. What to do? I know! I run back to Best Buy, whip out my Best Buy gift card again and buy a Zune! Nice screen, good sound quality. Got good reviews. Just aggravated people because it was marketed as a social, let's all share our music all the time, device, but it really wasn't.
I don't care about that. I don't want it for WiFi music sharing with some hippy. I want my music presented with good quality at a reasonable volume and a nice screen that shows album art at a decent size. For those things, the Zune looked like the way to go.
I bought it. Not expensive. 199 for 30gig. Pretty good. It looks a little clunky and it slightly bigger than my Zen, but album art is presented nicely and the whole screen looks nice and good. Not as good as the touch, but very few things are.
It seemed like a good compromise and I felt myself pulling out of the suck spiral.

But no. This particular suck spiral is quite strong.
Allow me to explain. The Zune is a Microsoft device. My PC is running Windows XP. A logical person would think you could just slap a USB cable on the Zune and onto the PC and POOF! connection. Apparently there were no logical people around when they designed the software.
My PC will not recognize the device. The driver WILL NOT INSTALL. I've been through the FAQs and troubleshooting guides on Microsoft and have not been able to get my PC to see the frigging thing.
Manual install of driver.
Uninstall and reinstall of device.
Uninstall and reinstall of the Zune software.
Install on another login.
Different USB ports.
Uninstall.
Total uninstall with removal of all temp files.
More time on the internet, more FAQs.
Nothing. Device manager sees it as a generic USB device and Zune software does not see one connected at all.
The various FAQs have suggested returning it or getting a new cable for it. I will return it first and see what happens.

If I happen into a wormhole at the Best Buy and stumble across myself from two weeks ago, I am going to give myself such a kick in the shnutts.