Just a quick note to recommend Arirang. It’s a Korean BBQ restaurant on Barrack Street – complete with the barbecue in the middle of the table. They bring out the meat and you cook it yourself, before eating it out of a lettuce leaf (as if it were a tortilla). Not something you see everyday and as a bonus, the food’s really good aswell. The puddings get a special mention too – my “peach fantasia” was a replica peach made from chocolate, ice cream and a fererro rocher as the stone (I dare you to make the “really spoiling us” gag). Brilliant.

Yes, that means I’m in Perth, Australia and yes, I’m feeling smug. G’night mate.

Anne biking in the sunshine on Rottnest Island, near Fremantle, Western Australia.

See more photos taken on 18th May 2006, or all of my photos from Australia and Brunei.

That’s me sat in the sunshine on Fremantle Harbour, waiting for my waffles to be delivered. Mmmm… waffles.

See more photos taken on 17th May 2006, or all of my photos from Australia and Brunei.

Owen, relaxing in Kings Park, Perth, Australia.

See more photos taken on 16th May 2006, or all of my photos from Australia and Brunei.

Sony confuse me.

They appear to have two pieces of music management software competing for the same space. There’s SonicStage, which came with MiniDiscs and the HD series of players. It’s ugly and horrible to use but had the massive advantage of being fairly stable. Then they’ve got the new upstart, Connect Player, which comes with the new A-series Walkmans (Walkmen?). It’s both prettier and easier to use, but until recently was horribly slow and crashed every few seconds. I’ll ignore the third option, which I believe shipped with the PSP.

The thing is, they’ve finally got the Connect Player working as it should. It’s not perfect, but it works properly. Hooray! But now SonicStage is about to trump it again, adding support for the very Walkmans that Connect was designed to work with.

Come on Sony, make your minds up. What’s it to be? Connect Player or SonicStage? It was good to keep SonicStage around while you got Connect Player into a usable state, but surely now you should drop it? If you do keep developing it, it needs a major interface upgrade at the very least. It still looks and feels like some “scene” software from the heyday of the Amiga A500.

Maybe I’ve been spoilt by the likes of iTunes — software that makes it easy to look after thousands of songs — but then so has the rest of the world. I think Sony need to think long and hard, then cull one of these applications and bring the other one up to spec.

Update — It seems that the Connect Player is no more. Let’s hope SonicStage gets an interface upgrade in the next version, because even version 4.0 is miles behind the competition.

Seeing as both Owen and SBG had both got themselves shiny new bikes (the former an Orange 5, the latter a Scott Genius), and it was a lovely (rainy, blustery, miserable) day, we figured we’d go out for a ride. It was a good ride, all in all. We just went for a quick play up Lecky and had all sorts of fun, right up until the very last downhill of the day.

We rode out of the car-park and down the old tramway. I pedalled away like a maniac and proceeded to scare myself just about all the way down, forgetting that I don’t have gert big Saint brakes on the Cannondale – I nearly fell into the hedge on just about every corner. I came out into the final section (where Brett had the spleen incident back in the day) like a ballistic missile.

Oh, crap, there’s a new jump and I’m doing a million miles per hour! SPROING!!!!

I went up, came down, hit the second one with the back wheel still in the air and then came back to earth. Smoooooth. Quite how I got away with that, I don’t know. I stopped and shouted a warning to Owen who was descending some way behind me. He braked, rode around the jump and straight into the fence. We laughed at that for a while before Séan arrived.

Despite my shouts, he managed to hit the jump at full speed and launched head-first into the ground, spanging himself and firing his bike over his head and into the big metal fence. He then proceeded to scream all manner of profanities for a short while, before scaring the hell out of us by going into shock and shaking violently for a good few minutes. Thankfully he was just bruised and grazed and in need of a new helmet.

We eventually came to the conclusion that he was going to be OK, so I went to pick his bike up out of the undergrowth. At first it all looked OK… except the handlebars didn’t look quite right. They may have been riser bars on both sides before, but now they’re retro drop-bars on the left, with a nice crease in them underneath the flappy gear/brake lever.

Nice one Séan, that crash was the stuff of legends.

Sony recently updated their Connect Player software (to version 1.0.04.16100) and I’m very glad to report that it’s a huge, huge improvement. It now runs at a decent speed on my fairly modest Athlon 1800+ system and appears to be stable. Nice one Sony.

Non-Starter

The new version wouldn’t start at first though – it just hung at the “Initialising Library” stage. The fix was fairly simple: I went to C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\Sony Corporation\CONNECT Player\Library (the path may be slightly different on your machine) and deleted everything in there. Once I did that, it started up with an empty library just fine.

From there, I went to File > Import Files... and pointed it at my iTunes music folder. It picked up everything (all 36.6gb of it) and imported it fairly quickly.

GAARGH! Compilations!

Alas Connect Player went the same way as SonicStage and imported each track in my various-artists compilations as a separate album. A bit of trial and error found a fairly easy way to correct this:

1. Switch the view mode to Group By: Album.
2. Open up one of the albums that make your compilation, right click on the track within and select Properties.
3. Under Album Artist enter Various Artists (or whatever else you want it to say). Click OK.
4. Now, select all of the other “albums” in that compilation (shift-click or ctrl-click to select more than one album) and drag-drop them onto the one you’ve just modified. Click OK to the warning box and hey presto! They’re all in one album.

Sync

Right, now for the one thing I’ve not tried yet: Syncing it up with my Walkman. Wish me luck…