BillyStyle

Yesterday was a great day. We’ve just got one student here at the camp this week, Ed from Sweden. It’s pretty laid back with just one fellow here. In the morning, after dropping the boat in at the ramp, I saw a tall white bird (I still don’t know what they are, I should find that out, some kind of crane or something) was trying to snag a lizard off of a palm tree. I watched it from about 15 feet away for a while. It was cool, its head didn’t move at all while it was creeping up in its would be victim. The bird’s neck was a good 18 inches long and it was swaying this way and that, but the head was perfectly still, weird stuff. He ended up giving up, that was too bad.

Then I rode in the afternoon. The other day I spent some time working on one wake stuff to reclaim some moves I’ve lost. So yesterday I went ahead and landed 2 of the 3 moves on the first try wake to wake. They were a HS BS 360 and a TS Backroll. Nice and easy. I couldn’t get my switch HS BS 3, but that’ll come. I may work on getting my TS 5 back first, since it has the same rotation in it. We’ll see.

The day ended with some tasty lasagna and then I popped in Ninja Gaiden Black that I just bought off of ebay. It’s an old XBox game that I was hooked on before, but now it’s upgraded and I’m super excited about it. So yeah, life’s pretty good right now! I should probably work on getting me a good woman now…and a dollar or two.

So Florida is slightly different than Utah, believe it or not. It has rained here probably half of the days that I’ve been here. The weather actually changes pretty quickly. I’ve seen weeks with almost all sunny weather, and weeks that are mostly gray. It’s a nice variety. I still enjoy the rain, having lived in St. George for 7 years and seeing it rain about 10 times. Well, maybe a little more than that, but it’s a good change.

That’s all for now, have a nice day!

I haven’t really posted just about wakeboarding since the move, so here we go. It’s awesome. I ride at least a few times a week. It would be more, but since it’s the dead of winter, some of the days are a bit chilly and windy, so we wait a day or two and ride in the warmth again. The Florida winter is warm most of the time with just a few cold days in a row.

[Wakeboard lingo warning] My riding has improved since coming down here. I’ve got my switch toeside threes consistent now, even grabbing some of them. My moves I had dialed this summer are still there for me real consistent, and now I am working on getting some of my old moves back. Next week I plan on getting my heelside front flip back, then some of my threes. Namely, heelside backside, switch heelside frontside and backside. I’ll probably do some toeside fives too, since I haven’t done any of those in over a year. I think I can land it within two or three tries.

The people I ride with are all great. The coaches all spin to win. Most sets consist of a lot of grabs, 180s, 360s, and some 540s, most of them grabbed and poked. Then they all have that one or two inverts that they like to throw in there. One rider who lives about two minutes away is Ben Greenwood. He is still a coach here, but doesn’t coach unless he’s been requested or we need another coach for some reason. The reason behind that is that he was the rider of the year recently, and he stays busy enough keeping sponsors happy to make decent money from that. I get to ride with him regularly too, which is awesome. If watching him ride doesn’t inspire somebody, they can’t get inspired.

So with that, here’s a little clip of Mr. Ben Greenwood, so you can see what I get to see on a regular basis, in person. Oh, and the song is Destroy Everything You Touch by Ladytron, whom I dig.

Do this to people and report back in the comments!

I named this “Part 1″ because I have many complaints about Apple, as in the snooty computer company. I wouldn’t care enough to post about them if they didn’t offer 2 great products. It’s just the fact that they have 2 superior products (iPod and Final Cut video editing software) that I am involved enough to really get annoyed with the way Apple does things. Everything else about Apple really gets under my skin. I’ll try to keep this one short-ish (I failed, so I put sub-headings in the post). It has to do with what I just spent the past hour of my time trying to figure out.

What I’m After

This has to do with my iPod…more specifically, with one of the most horrible applications ever spewed into the digital world: iTunes. One quick note, if somebody is reading this and knows of a better solution, PLEASE let me know of an alternative.

A while ago, I bought a large collection of audio CDs by a religious author of whom I have grown quite fond. His name is Truman G. Madsen. Shortly after buying the discs, I ripped them to my computer in mp3 format, the most universal compressed audio format around. So now that I have a nice new iPod (my old one died after only 5 years of very infrequent use, which is really a joke, VCRs typically last much longer) I figured I’d use the neat new Audio Books section to listen to Truman’s dissertations. Boy was I in for a surprise!

The Problem

I started by moving the files to my iPod using iTunes. Then I selected the files and looked for a place in the “Get Info” menu to set them to audio book files (since I could only drag the files to the iPod, not to a specific area). That option didn’t exist. I then turned to the iTunes help menu…no help. So I went to Google. The only solution I found (which I found in around a dozen different places) was quite the opposite of Apple’s claim of how “it just works.”

The Solution

Here’s what I found out, step by step, that I have to do to get this to work:

1. Put the mp3 files into the iTunes library, the one on my computer, not my iPod.
2. Change the import settings to import songs using the AAC format.
3. Convert the mp3 files to aac files (hooray, I get to double compress the files since I have the CDs in storage).

Here’s the fun part!

4. Now, rename every aac file extension from .m4a to .m4b. Apparently that makes the files show up in iTunes as audio book files (nice and easy, since most people don’t even know what a file extension is).
5. Add the newly converted and renamed files to the iPod. They will now show up in the Audio Books area.

Now, to me, that seems a bit more tedious than being able to drag the files directly into the Audio Books area within iTunes. I don’t know, call me lazy, but that seems like it would make the most sense. After all, there is an entire area devoted to audio books with its own little icon and everything. Wouldn’t it make sense to be able to drag files into that area? If only I was smart enough to figure that out, maybe Apple would let me do it.

How I Would’ve Done It

I’ll now make a comparative step-by-step list of how I think it should be done, just for comparison’s sake.

1. Drag mp3 files into the Audio Books area of the iPod contents within iTunes.

That’s not entirely true, I would have it set up to do it without the use of iTunes, but that is simply inconceivable.

Why I’m Mad at Apple

The fact that I couldn’t find anything about how to add my own audio book CDs to my iPod within Apple’s help files tells me one thing that I already knew about Apple, but for some reason, thought they may have lightened up on: If you are willing to pay Apple a lot of money, they will let you use their products in the way they decide you should use them on your own computer. Now isn’t that awesome? All I get when I use Windows is a choice of what software I would like to use to do whatever it is I want to do in whatever way I want to do it. I guess Windows doesn’t realize I’m too stupid to realize that the way I want to do it isn’t the cool or trendy way in which I should do it.

Sarcasm

Thanks Apple! If I ever get rich enough to use only your products, maybe I’ll be able to run my computer just like everyone else with an Apple so I can be trendy and awesome!

Conclusion

Because in the end, I like things to work the way I think they should work (yeah, I’m a PC user, not a Mac user, I think for myself), I will most likely spend the time to re-convert those files, rename the file extensions, and put them on my iPod so I can pretend that Apple isn’t trying to ruin my brain.

If I post deeper into this series, you may see a recurring theme of how I feel that Apple is pure evil for 2 reasons. First, they require large sums of money to stay true to their products and be able to get full functionality out of the things for which end users have already paid. Second, they make it very difficult to customize the way their products work. I believe that is because they figure most people are too dumb to know what they want and might break things, so they just tell you that their way is the cool and groovy way to do it.

The End…for now.

Well, in the past hour, I’ve received 2 requests to update this here blog of mine. So I suppose I will.

I’ll go in this order:
- Excuses
- Update on stuff
- Excuses for the future

Excuses
Right now I’m living out of bags, and just recently put a wireless network card in my desktop computer. I am finally getting used to primarily using my laptop, as I used my desktop for 99% of my INTERNETING in the past. I still prefer the desktop, but its location has a weak wireless signal, so right now I’m using the laptop where the signal is stronger. Anyway, most of my files and such are on the desktop, so that threw a good hitch in my blogging practices.

Update
I dig it here! I’m in the middle of my third week here at the camp. So far, the campers have consisted of 4 Canadians, one Mexican, 2 Australians, 3 Swedes, and a couple locals (one of which is a local cop, Johnny Law we call him). Kind of neat that other than the locals, no people from the USA have been here yet. So I’ve learned some Spanish and Swedish words, but not very much.

As far as coaching goes, I started by just being on the boats during the coaching. Then I drove a bit. Now I’ve spent 2 full days coaching solo. My first day I taught Andrew, the French-Canadian, how to do a front roll. That was awesome. I’ve coached before, so I’m pretty comfy with that, but I find myself doubting my technique a little now because I’m surrounded by such great coaches. It’s so laid back here though that I really feel trusted by the other guys, which is cool. I think it’s like any other job as far as getting comfortable with my surroundings and gaining confidence…only a lot more fun.

I’ve ridden a fair amount, about a few times a week. That should change to almost every day as soon as the holiday stuff passes and people get back in town. A huge perk of the job is that we get to ride almost every day if we want, and we do want!

This is the most racially diverse place I’ve ever lived, and I like it. The only other Mormons I’ve ran into are the ones at church, a bit of a change from Utah. I’m looking forward to getting a place of my own so I feel like I actually live here. Right now it still kind of seems like a vacation. I went home to Oregon for Christmas, so I still haven’t been here longer than 2 weeks at a time.

Excuses for the Future
Soon, I’ll have my condo in St. George sold, and the hunt for living quarters will begin. I assume that during that time I won’t be posting very often either. Until that time, I’ll try to do better!

Update:
Just as I was proofreading this, another camper showed up. He’s Demetris, a guy from Greece, so yet another foreigner, awesome.