Weekly Rundown: Out for a walk

I'll keep this week's post short as in a little while I'm off with some colleagues for a walk. It was originally going to be up a hill but since then we've found a different route to take, so instead of having the usual Sunday roast I'm going to be toddling off and have a chicken sandwich when we pause for a rest. I foresee a lot of chatting and laughing.

I actually had a bit of a warm up walk yesterday.

On the way home from getting my hair cut in town we stopped at Kerrycroy beach and threw Tara in the sea for a while. Both Mr Click and Tara got thoroughly soaked. Then I walked her home in the rain and got pretty wet myself. The walk home was actually intended to dry out the labrador but I think we both ended up wetter than ever. I had to keep wiping my nose, not because it was running but because water kept dripping off the end of it.

On the plus side, I have found some earphones that work with my phone. My cheap ones I use with my Kindle and mp3 player don't seem to get on with my Samsung phone. I've been putting music onto my phone again (I had a few songs on it before I wiped it, but for some reason when I backed everything up they weren't included). I think I've been driving Mr Click crazy playing the same three songs over and over again, so I've add some of the songs from The Hobbit film soundtracks to vary it a little.

Speaking of adding tracks to media devices, I had a fun weekend trying to get my BBC radio production of The Lord of the Rings onto my Kindle.

Last year, when I travelled to Gloucester by bus, I knew I would have a twelve hour journey so figured it would be the perfect time to crack out the 13+ hours of Lord of the Rings which I've owned for years but am yet to make it all the way through. As I settled in for the long journey on the bus I started trying to play it, only to discover that as I'd ripped the twelve CDs in the set into the same folder (rather than titling them CD1, CD2, etc.) they automatically sorted themselves into tracks. So I had track 1 of CD1, then track 1 of CD2, then track 1 of CD3, and so on.

It was a disaster. A disaster which was further compounded by my earphones blowing up on me.
Now I'm preparing for another long bus journey in the coming week, I figured perhaps it was time to put this past issue to bed and have another go and ripping The Lord of the Rings to my Kindle.
Friday night I sat up way past my bedtime, carefully coping out all the track titles. This time I was wiser. Before copying out the title of each track I added a three-digit number so I knew where it came in the sequence. I was going to beat it this time.

Three hours later I had everything done.

While the final CD, a music one, was ripping, I copied across the files I'd done so far. Fired up the Kindle Fire and tried to find the BBC Radio folder I'd created. And it wasn't there. When I went to recently added files all I could see were the last six tracks I'd added, none of which were the story of The Lord of the Rings. And then it dawned on me. I'd ripped them all as .wma files, instead of .mp3 and my Kindle wouldn't recognise them.

I went to bed in a bit of a huff with the whole enterprise.

The story does have a happy ending though.

I got up early on Saturday and tried all over again, making extra sure that I was ripping them in the correct format. And this time it worked. There was a slight hiccup when I was making the playlist and I realised that at one point I got to file 069 and followed it up with a second set of 060 to 069. Once I'd figured out which 060 should come first and which should come second it was fine.

So now I'm nearly ready to go. I still have to finish packing, which means I still have to get my washing dry. But other than that, I'm practically ready for Wales.


I can't wait.

P.S. Remember my bookcase from last week's post?

Well now it looks like this:

Also, notice how closely cropped the top picture is compared to the bottom one. That's because the room was a bit of a mess. Now I've been able to pull out those boxes of books from the cupboard upstairs and put the other stuff in the cupboard instead.

It's perfect.