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I had a 2 gig iPod Nano (Generation 1) for over a year. During the time I really liked my iPod. Everything just worked. I subscribed to a bunch of podcasts and all was happy. At the end of 2006 it started getting a little screwy. I would get sound only on one headphone and ended up tossing it, as Apple told me it’d cost ~200 to fix it now that the warranty is over.

No worries, I figured. This was just the excuse i was looking for to buy the latest and greatest from Apple. I decided to go for the 8 gig 2nd Gen Nano, as it looked the nicest and the cost of the extra space seemed worth it.

Since then I have longed for my first generation Nano. This new Nano hangs just about every week. I still listen to a bunch of podcasts and I still like the Nano for the most part, but the Gen 2 Nano has issues. Every week or so I will attempt to play a podcast and the Nano will just hang. It’s never the same day or the same podcast, but pressing play causes the screen to get stuck in between redraws. The only way to get this to work again is to reset the Nano. Attempting to play the same podcast that caused the hang after the reset works just fine! And yes, I am finding the latest firmware. . .

Tonight I helped one of my buddies build an auto-attendant on Cisco CME + Unity. I was told that the auto-attendants were all controlled by tcl scripts, and figured I knew the language fairly well as I had experience writing tcl scripts for irc bots in the late 90’s. It wasn’t, I had to write the script using a silly Cisco GUI editor. To set a variable you have to drag an “equals” sign (=) labeled ’set’ from the left side onto the part of the script where the variable is used. As I moved the “equals” sign to the right side to put it in place, everything was expanded and I lost track of where I was supposed to put it. Once I finally put it in the correct place I had to right-click and properties it to set the variable. Regardless, we got the job done fairly quick, and his customer is happy.

Now I’m not anti GUI or anything, but the interface really slowed things down. It was both clumsy and cumbersome. As a person who writes scripts on a regular basis, I felt like I was tripping over the GUI over and over. I can’t imagine having to use this on a regular basis. Now I’m not an elitist or anything like that, there are many GUI’s which I use on a daily. I even use QmailAdmin GUI more often than the command line interface when dealing with my mail servers. All I am really saying is that I believe Cisco’s CUE Editor needs some serious usability work done. It is a horrid interface for creating scripts.

During the Christmas break I saw an HDNet Marathon of Arrested Development. During this time I saw almost all of Season 1 and was laughing through most of it. Afterwards I bought all 3 seasons on Amazon and really enjoyed watching all 3 seasons from beginning to end. I’d really recommend this series to all.

Hopefully this show can be resurrected, as many others had, based on the DVD sales. It’s a long shot, but it would be really cool