I’ve had my Nomad Zen for just over a month now. I’ve loaded almost 6500 tracks from 525 albums and it’s only about half full. However, I did have a slight issue with it. Walking across campus the other day, I tripped over my own damn feet. Luckily, the Nomad broke my fall 😦. I ripped the protective case and scuffed the LCD screen, but otherwise it didn’t seem any the worse for wear. However, when I fired it up on the flight to Sydney it wouldn’t work. It would boot and claim to be playing, but no music came out. If I selected a new song, it would freeze and needed a hard reboot or battery removal in order to shut down. I tried the reset button and reloading the firmware, no luck. Today, I searched Creative Labs’ knowledge base, searched for “zen xtra crash” and found an article on the Zen’s Rescue Mode. This allows you to Clean Up, Format All and Reload OS. Clean Up took a while – around 15 minutes – but it did the trick. I guess the rapid deceleration caused some temporary issue to the internal hard drive, but there don’t seem to be any residual effects. Even the song that I was listening to when I fell is fine.

Of course, no device is perfect. In addition to “Make Rescue Mode Easily Discoverable”, I have two minor quibbles with the device. First, it doesn’t draw power from the USB connection. With Red Chair’s Notmad Explorer, I can play the music from the Zen thru my computer’s speakers. I also use Notmad Explorer to convert my music from WMA lossless to WMA 96k when it transfers to the Zen. In both of these cases, the Zen is connected to the computer for a long period of time. It would be nice if I didn’t have to plug in both power and USB. Second (and more likely to be addressed as it’s a software issue) is that when you’re listening to a song, you can get it’s track details, displaying the artist and album names. It would be nice to be able to jump directly to the artist or album in the music library from the track details screen.

Minor quibbles aside, this is an awesome device.

My presentations at TechEd New Zealand went well. At TechEd US, I was more comfortable doing the Data in SOA talk and it got a slightly higher eval score. Of course, that was the talk that I was expecting to do and that I had spent some time writing new content for. Metropolis was a last minute add since Pat couldn’t go. At TechEd NZ, I was more comfortable doing the Metropolis talk. Pat spent significant time working on Data in SOA for TechEd Europe and I just picked up his updates en masse. It’s a great talk, but I wasn’t as comfortable as I had been doing my version of the talk.

After my presentations, I attended an architect dinner with local architects. I had some fascinating discussions with some of the attendees, saw a presentation on EDRA (i.e. the project formerly known as “Shadowfax”) and participated in a great panel discussion.

Yesterday, we flew to Sydney, met up with my mom, and took the train to Canberra for TechEd Australia. The train was nice because Patrick could get up and run around as much as he wanted, plus we got a great look at the country side – we saw several kangaroos. Canberra is very cold – though the sun is out now – and walking to find a place for dinner last night was quite chilly. The cab driver who picked us up at the train station was a hoot. We asked her what had been here before the capital moved here and she replied “What should be here now, a sheep paddock”. I wish I had gotten her name so she could give us a ride back when head back to Sydney. The hotel is underwhelming (the perils of late registration) but the event hall is pretty cool. I spent a morning with a Meta analyst this morning, lunch with the local field architect and my Metropolis talk is about two hours.