the everyday adventures of sabrina

made it to manchester by around five, CST, today, after leaving brunswick at about 8:30 EST. the average speed according to my car’s trip computer was around 68 mph, but i later discovered that it’s off by a couple of mph — the gps unit showed me moving roughly three mph slower than the car’s speedometer. oh well. around 570 miles in 9.5 hours, including stops. 417 miles on 12.6 gallons of gas, and many hilly miles at that. and, bully for me, only one diversion from the goal, a local winery a little north of nashville called something that i’ll link to after i unpack the bottles when i get home and figure out the winery’s name again. they produced a decent port — nothing really special, but tasty enough, and only $18 a bottle — and some interesting wines, so i ended up with a couple of bottles of cabernet sauvignon and one of their ‘sumner queen,’ a sweet white dessert wine… well, they called it semi-sweet and didn’t say anything about dessert, but that’s what i’m figuring it for, because it was sweet. so there.)

bored now. john hasn’t emailed or called me back, so i checked into a ramada (“truckers welcome!” … it’s clean enough, but the bra i’m wearing cost more than the room for the night — and it’s not from the Angels collection) off US 41 (also known as lake shore drive, in northerlier climes). i’m going to go hunt down some food here before much longer. kill some time at the wal-mart or something, i dunno.

i’m so going to kick his ass if i leave tennessee without catching up with him.

called mom. she’s only got wednesday and thursday off work, so that pretty much means my choices are:

1. Drive 770 miles tomorrow, attempting to get to Rusk relatively close to when she gets off work at 11ish pm Tuesday;
2. Screw around while driving 770 miles in two days, visiting the Jack Daniels distillery (conveniently close to Manchester) and anything else that catches my eye, arriving relatively close to when she gets off work at 11ish pm Tuesday.

i don’t know which one i’d prefer. the first would be a pain in the ass, but at least i wouldn’t have to pay for a second hotel room. and i could always spend tuesday working on mom’s computer or something. otoh, making it a real two-day trip would make it more vacationy. and i like vacationy. vacationy is better than stressful. but then there’s the sad reality that one can only look through so many antique malls or kitschy roadside whatevers before one’s head explodes. oh well. whatever. i’ll figure it out.

dammit john, you better call me.

so, i admit it: i’m an iTunes Music Store whore. i just love being able to go online and buy albums for $10. and i can do it whenever i want, so if at 3 AM i suddenly decide i need to hear hank williams or whatever, i can just go get it, and poof! i have hank williams. it rocks.

i also like listening to audiobooks. they’re nifty, and muy convenient. but they’re also expensive — for example, the audiobook version of Stephen King’s The Wolves of the Calla, the Dark Tower V, was $65 (compare to the hardback, which was something like $24.95).

so, since john made me listen to David Sedaris’ Live at Carnegie Hall at the farm a couple weekends ago, and i discovered it was actually pretty funny, then i finished my book and then whipped through his copy of Me Talk Pretty One Day, which was also pretty funny, when i was browsing iTunes a couple of days ago and saw that they had the unabridged version of his new book, Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim, for only $16.95, i was like, yeah! i’ll totally buy that! so i did.

but there’s a problem.

To: iTunes Feedback
From: sabrina downard
Subject: Audiobook format badly designed
Feedback Type: Design/Ease of Use

Hello. I recently purchased and downloaded David Sedaris’ “Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim” unabridged audiobook from the iTunes Music Store, which was my first attempt at buying an audiobook from the iTunes Music Store. Although audiobooks on CD are horribly expensive, I wish I had bought the actual disks in this instance — the David Sedaris book is split into only three tracks! Obviously, whoever made that decision has never listened to an audiobook in his or her life. Most audiobooks on CD that I buy come with many tracks per disk, at least 20 but at least one of them has over 60. Why? Because it’s FREAKING ANNOYING to lose your place! Do you have any idea how annoying it’s going to be to listen for a bit, turn off the iPod, then try and listen again later at home on my laptop, when I have to fast-forward to guess where my place was?

Not to mention the tracks are of such long durations that they’re too long to burn to CD, making the book useless for listening to in my car.

And of course the Music Store GUI doesn’t tell you how many tracks the book is, so I couldn’t have known about this ahead of time.

I’m highly disappointed. All of my iTunes music purchases have been very smooth, but this, I wish I had just gone to the store. Despite your way, way better pricing, I won’t be purchasing any more audiobooks from iTunes until such time as (a) I can see how many tracks there are *before* purchasing (COME ON! How lame is that?! I might understand not wanting to sell audiobooks on a track basis, but this is basic information that you ought to make available pre-purchase), and (b) the content is split into tracks of much shorter duration, making it actually usable.

I look forward to your response.

Dear Customer:

Thank you for your feedback regarding iTunes. We cannot respond to you personally, but please know that your message has been received and will be reviewed by the iTunes Feedback Team. If we need to follow up with you on your ideas for improving iTunes, we will contact you directly.

If you wrote to us for technical support with iTunes, we need to inform you that the Feedback Team cannot address these types of queries. For available support options, please visit the iTunes support page.

We appreciate your assistance in making iTunes better.

iTunes Feedback Team
Apple

bah.