So there’s music in Nina.
I last talked about this last year when I bought my Sony Walkman (NW-A45/B). I still love the Walkman and am currently
still using it, but only because there isn’t an obvious solution. The problem?
It stops working in the car on almost every sing start-up. In the morning I walk out and start up the
car. As I was last listening to the
Walkman, it starts playing on the radio.
I take a moment to put my wallet away (I don’t take it into work so I ‘hide’
it in my car), arrange my tasty beverage (Gatorade Zero), connect my phone (I
talked about not wanting to do this, but I’ll get more into why I do it now
later), make sure I’m comfortably in the center of the seat without my pants
riding up the crack of my ass (they’re slacks and they ride up unless
controlled!), and then shift her into get and idle out of the driveway (she
idles so damned fast!).
Except that’s not exactly the way it works out. You see somewhere between starting up the car
and getting my pants out of my ass the Walkman disconnects from the car. The audio system moves back to the FM Radio
which means it starts blasting the NPR show 1A.
I can immediately reach up and hit the ‘source’ button and watch the
Walkman re-attach itself and select it again.
It starts right up and I have my music back. I just have to do that most of the time I
start up the car. IF Nina was only
sitting for 3 hours or less, it won’t disconnect and reconnect, but 4
hours? 6 hours? Overnight?
She’s going to bail and have to be re-connected. It’s a pain in the ass. A first world problem, to be sure, but a pain
in the ass problem none the less.
So how do I fix this?
Well, my first thought was the phone.
I’m now connecting my phone up to my car on any drive longer than a
couple minutes so that I have the full Android Auto experience. Google Maps, Waze, PocketCasts (for
podcasts), the Google Assistant…. It’s all great. And yes, it’s a little bit of a pain to skip
back out to pull the radio (and/or Walkman) up, but It’s become muscle memory. As long as the phone is already connected to
the car, why not just use it as my source for music? That would connect me to Google Music and I
already download all of the music to my phone so it wouldn’t be streaming it
(but CAN stream it if I want to!). The
problem is sound quality. While yes, the
phone is physically attached to the car, it’s using that connection as some low
level data and power. The audio is all
connected via Bluetooth. Bluetooth audio
has some a long LONG way but neither my phone nor the car has any advanced
codex so sound quality is really quite poor.
It does just fine for pod casts and once I hit the highway that’s my
primary listening choice, but it’s not great for music.
I’ve tried a few things to improve it, but after more
research, that’s just not going to be an option.
The phone isn’t an option.
The iPod isn’t an option. Not
having my music isn’t an option. Grrr.
I’ve looked into alternative music players and they all have
a common problem… playlists. They don’t
have an easy way to generate and maintain playlists. Understand, I use my computer as my music hub
and would like to make and maintain my playlists there. iTunes was a pain, but it worked for making
playlists on the iPod. Sony Music Center
is a pain, but it works for making playlists on the Walkman. None of the other players seem to have
software on them. You are expected to
just throw your music over on them and make your playlists on the player itself. Fine, but my ‘drive’ playlist has over 400
songs on it and my ‘good tunes’ playlist has over 900. I’m not editing those playlists together and
then maintaining them to be mirrors of what I have on the computer, on a player’s
small screen.
That’s a problem that is ongoing. Right now, I’m just dealing with the Walkman,
but I’m really ready for an upgrade and a resolution to this problem.
Speaking of the car, Nina is still great. She looks great, she sounds great, she drives
great. She’s a little squirly on very
wet roads (think downpour), but I’m adjusting my driving to her. She has earned me many compliments. I actually had a guy pull up next to me at a
stop light and start shouting from his work truck ‘NICE CAR MAN!’ Many people at work are now jokingly asking
me to loan them my car and calling me ‘sport’ and ‘sport car’.
The drive to work is currently mainly highway. It’s not a 4 lane interstate though, it’s a 2
lane country highway. It’s honestly a beautiful
drive. There’s three passing lane areas
so if you get stuck behind a slowpoke you can make up time, but with adaptive
cruise, I don’t even mind slow drivers. I
used to think that the only problem on the drive was the fact that there were
two stop lights. A highway shouldn’t
ever have a stoplight in my opinion. But
now, those are both opportunities to hear Nina sing. If I get caught at one and am the first in
line, the speed limit is still 55. I
wait, anxiously, for the light to turn green and then hit the gas hard (I don’t
floor it, but it’s above ¾ pedal!) and move from zero to sixty miles per hour
in about four seconds. And OH MY GOD she
sounds so good doing that.
Those two stoplights are now treasures!
There are a couple downsides to Nina. I mentioned the adaptive cruise and I knew I
had to have that as an option on whatever car followed up Isabella. When I saw that the Mustang had it, I was
done researching it. I’m not sure it
would have made a difference, but I should have continued to research as there
are differences in adaptive cruise, even amongst Ford cars. Isabella had what the industry seems to be
calling ‘Adaptive Cruise with Stop an Go’.
That means she could go all the way down to a complete stop. So long as you weren’t at a full stop for
more than three seconds, you started rolling forward when the traffic
resumed. It was REALLY nice for highway traffic
through construction zones or bumper to bumper major city highway traffic. I could leave the cruise set at 70 and follow
the construction zone down to 20 miles per hour or less as long as I was
following somebody else. And if we came
to a full stop? All I had to do was tap
the gas once traffic started back up and it resumed operation.
Nina, on the other hand, doesn’t have the ‘stop and go’
portion of that. Yes, she has adaptive
cruise and will slow down or speed up depending on the traffic in front of her,
but once she drops down to 12 miles per hour, the adaptive cruise just turns
off. The first few times that happened,
I almost rear-ended the car in front of me.
It’s not a huge problem and certainly not a deal breaker, but it does
suck to have and get used to a technology only to have it taken away when I get
a newer car.
Nina also sits quite a bit lower. Lower than even Isabella, which wasn’t sitting
up high by any means. It’s harder to see
around traffic, it’s harder to see traffic lights, and for me personally it’s
harder at lunch. At lunch, while at
work, I drive over to an abandoned parking lot just down the road from the
prison. A lot of people use it for a
smoking area between the prison and the factory across the street. I think, technically, it’s the factory’s
property but no one has ever said we prison employees aren’t welcome. Anyway, it IS an abandoned parking lot so
they don’t exactly care for it. The
pavement that’s left is broken and uneven, there are large and deep mud
puddles, and it’s never plowed or cleared when it’s snowy. Oh, and the tall grass between it and the
road isn’t trimmed. During the height of
summer (now, as I write this), it can get four to six feet tall.
Now when I drove Mom’s Escape, I could clearly and easily
see over the grass. Pulling back onto
the road wasn’t a problem. In Isabella,
it wasn’t exactly easy, but I could put my bumper just about in traffic and by
leaning forward in my seat see around enough of the grass that I could enter
traffic without threatening an accident.
Nina? No.
With Nina, she’s actually lower than Isabella so I’m looking
through even more of the grass. I tried
the ‘nose out until almost in traffic’ method but Nina’s nose is quite a bit
longer than Isabella’s and by the time I could see around the grass, I had a
good foot of bumper in the road. I can’t
even rely on the 5.0 and 460 horse power to save me (she can get up to traffic speed
amazingly fast!) as the pavement is practically dirt at the entrances and all I’d
do if I tried to quickly enter traffic is spin the tires.
Solution? I’ve had to
drive an extra mile down the road to another abandoned parking lot (there seems
to be plenty of those around, being a prison area after all!). The biggest drawback to this new area is that
it’s right next to a residential area. I
don’t want to ever be ‘That Asshole Mustang Driver’ so I put the exhaust in ‘quiet’
mode and sit there to have my lunch. And
yes, I have to keep the car running as it’s still in the 80s when I go to
lunch. By the time the temps dip down to
quiet enough that I don’t have to have the AC running, the grass will have died
near the other parking lot and I’ll be free to park there again.
I’ve stepped away from D+X as I’m right now more focused on
defining my own feminine self instead of playing with a fictionalized form of
my feminine self. Speaking of ‘my own
feminine self’, I’m noticing a LOT more recently how many people around here
use non ‘normal’ sexual terms as pejoratives.
‘That’s Gay”. “He’d have fought,
but he’s a fag and was weak”. “The country
isn’t ready for a queer boy president”. This
has always bothered me in the past but maybe because I now freely think of
myself as Queer it’s bothering me an extra level. I try to always be clear and concise when I
speak about any of these subjects, but people always bring the conversation
down to the lowest common denominator level of speech…. And that’s a really low
common denominator. It also goes to show
that I probably shouldn’t be very open about being queer unless I want to be
looked at differently. If someone at
work finds out about my true self there will be absolutely nothing that changes
between me and them…. But they’ll still treat me differently. If nothing else, they’d start speaking differently
around me.
Anyway, I miss D+X.
I’m close to getting a trip to San Francisco. My friend, E, who lives there is excited
about seeing A and I come and visit.
Plane tickets are so FREAKING expensive between here and there. From where I live the nearest major airport
is the Detroit Metro Airport. Flying first
class (and I only fly first class!) from Detroit down to Dallas normally costs
me between $300 and $600 depending on when I book it. San Fran?
It’s between $900 and $2000.
One, that is one hell of a price swing. Seriously?
Two, why is it three times as expensive to fly to San Fran? I’d say it’s because Detroit and Dallas are
both Delta hubs, but the prices also include United and American, neither of
which are Detroit hubs. It’s actually
about the same price to fly down to Dallas and then on to San Fran. That’s probably what I’m going to do. Fly down to Dallas, meet up with A, then fly
together with him over to San Fran.
Speaking of E in San Fran, he just this weekend bought a motorcycle. A classic BMW one. It’s really got me thinking about getting a
motorcycle myself. Where his is more of
a Café Racer, I’d get a classic low riding cruiser. Looking through San Fran’s craigslist I found
several that would be fine for me, used of course, for around $2000. I really REALLY thought they would be more expensive. Now if only I could actually ride a
motorcycle and not look like an idiot while doing it!
I still think I’m going to let A and E know that I’m Queer. I just want someone to know and they’re two
people that I trust implicitly.
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