Trip (?) to Sri Lanka

A lot of you already know I went back to Sri Lanka last December. I flew Sri Lankan, and we had a disappointment to begin with. The flight was delayed for about 1 hour. It wasn’t a short trip either. Almost about 13hours with one brief stop at Male. It’s so funny how we went over Sri Lanka to Male, and came back. About 3hours wasted! My parents were there waiting for me for about 2 hours. I had to buy some chocolates from the Duty Free as well, as I didn’t bring enough from Japan. Well, I happened to have bought enough chocolates from Japan, just that I underestimated what I had bought.

Anyways…

I was hardly around the house. Most of the times, I was at my girlfriend’s place. Lunch from home, dinner from her place. hehe. My friends and I (and my girl friend as well) got together one day to watch a movie and have lunch. That, and the visit to Tharaka’s new house was the only times I met with the friends. Ah I forgot, that I went to see Lasitha as well.

Other than that, my girl friend and I went on shopping, to the beach, to the zoo, to the temple and here and there. No big trips or anything. She is studying for the exam, so couldn’t have fun all the time. Nevertheless, I enjoyed visits to her place. Oh wait! We went to check the hotel prices for the wedding too, just to get an idea on how expensive it is gonna get (and how much I will have to cut down on buying stuff from Amazon XD)

Time passed by too quickly. I was in Japan in no time. Even the flight time was very short. That is not bad however. Damn, it was work next day. Back to work. Can’t wait for the next time to go back. It will most probably be next August.

Oh and I didn’t bring much techno stuff this time around. Hope to take some next time though. I might need to sell my video card, depending on the requirements of Crysis 2. Playing Crysis 2 is my biggest short term target. LOL

How to manage music and videos in the iPod without Syncing

This post is related to the previous post by me. I was talking about the media syncing woes in the iPod with iTunes. Actually there seems to be a way to manage media without the sync feature.

When you go into the Summary page of your iPod or iPhone, there is a check box saying “Manually manage music and videos”. When you check it, you can simply drag and drop music and videos from Explorer to the iPod/iPhone listed on the left sidebar of iTunes. Phew! Problem solved. Now I can delete the videos from the PC that I don’t need.

Syncing iPod over iTunes is such a pain in the @55

I am trying to copy a couple of movies to the iPod but it is not doing it the way I want it to. I guess that is what you get when you buy Apple. You have to agree with Mr. Jobs and assume this is the best way of doing things.

The issue is this. I have a 1080p video and to copy it to the iPod, I have to convert it to M4V format and have to make it smaller. That is not a problem. I don’t even need separate software for that. ATI video converter that comes with the ATI Catalyst driver does the job.

Now how do I copy this to the iPod? Of course via iTunes. I have to add the new converted video to the library. Then I have to select the iPod, and in the movies tab, I have to check Sync Movies option and select the movie from the Library and press Sync.

You can only *SYNC* videos. Which means, you have to keep the video in the hard drive. Otherwise when you want to add another video, and you sync it, you will lose the video you synced previously because it is no longer in the hard drive. That sucks right? I mean, if it is original 1080p video, then OK, I can keep it in the hard drive. But this is the video which was transcoded from it. I don’t wanna keep it in the hard drive.

This sucks! By trying to over simplify things, Apple have made things way confusing to us. Why can’t you just drag and drop videos from Windows Explorer to the iPod? It should be flexible. Oh dear, I am gonna drive Ama crazy with all these synching crap.

P.S.  I bet there are apps you can use with iPods. Gotta google.