Customs duty, inaccessible audio plays and other banes of my existence

You remember I bought a load of stuff from ThinkGeek back in November? We just got a bill in the post for various customs duties and taxes which adds £40 to the price. I've no idea why it's that much and I also don't know why it's taken three months to get here after the items arrived. I've apparently now been banned from ordering any more stuff from there, though I fully intend to look into what of this stuff actually requires customs duty.

It's all a bit ridiculous, to be honest.


You know what really bugs me? The way all audio players are geared towards music. Okay, so music is probably the most common use for them but what about audio books and plays? As far as I know, and please correct me if I'm wrong, all the major audio programs are geared towards music. Everything is referred to as a track and default settings merge the end of one track into the beginning of the next – a cool effect for fading finishes and intros but a pain in the ass for dialogue.

Yes, I know such things can be switched off. But it's not what's there that's the problem, it's what's missing. Compare your average DVD player program to a CD/audio equivalent. When watching a DVD, hardware players will remember where you were so long as they don't lose power and software ones will remember it for as long as needs be. Most have some form of bookmarking as well, should you wish to jump to a specific point that isn't near a chapter.

Not so with audio players though. If you want to stop in the middle of your arcane, sound-based story, you darned better have a piece of paper handy to write down how far into the track you are. Same thing goes for podcasts as well, which are even less likely to have any form of division between start and end.


That's probably one of those things I should think about more and write about when it's not twenty to midnight. I'll give it some consideration and maybe try finding out if such programs exist.

The whole thing was sparked off when I discovered that the audio plays on the last disc of my Davros DVD boxset couldn't simply be taken off the disc. I wasn't expecting to be able to play it in a CD player or with iTunes, it is still a DVD after all, but some plain audio files on the disc would have made everything a lot easier. As it is, you put it in and it's just hours of audio with a still image of the relevant CD boxart changing once in a while.

It would have been even better if they'd made some basic animations to go along with it, such as they did for the unfinished-serial-remade-as-an-audio-play Shada.


This post is pretty rushed and incoherent and I apologise for that, as usual. Between going back to school, this being the first weekend off again and still going into hospital in the morning, my whole sense of timing has been thrown off.

It's a better excuse than normal.

On the bright side, I've managed to find some time to start a short story based on The Grey Line. It introduces a few secondary characters and a few background points. It started off as a minor thing to solidify a particular character in my head but by the time I reached the fourth paragraph or so, it had taken on a life of it's own.

It's now a key part of the arc and helps form some of the scientific principles behind the operation of the Grey universe.

Awesome.

I might not get it finished tomorrow because I'll be going to that lunch at my aunt and uncle's for a large part of the day. At least I'll have plenty of quiet time to think about it, though, because I'll be going to that lunch at my aunt and uncle's for a large part of the day.

That's all I've got time for and a reasonable amount of all I've got to say.

Have a nice day.