iSweat install

So before the little papoose arrived, I knew I would have to update the iPod and iTunes - so I did that a couple of days ago. No worries, right? No. :(

I got the little nubbin and its buddy in the mail, plugged him in, but got the standard error message:



But but but! I did update everything! So I boot up iTunes and ask it to update itself. I plug in the iPod and ask it to update itself. Both said that they were fully updated and thanked me for being such a thoughtful updater. I tried to plug the transmitter again and it still didn't work.

Sadness. I hunted around until I found that I needed at least version 1.2 software on the iPod. That shouldn't be the problem though because I just... wha?! I've only got 1.1. But didn't I just...? No. I guess I didn't. I guess you can't count on the iTunes software to update your iPod - sad. Anywhoo, I found the manual update download, and it's not an update, but an new install. Ok, no real worries there, I guess. Odd, but should still work ok.

Part of the joy of a new install is a wipe of everything off of your iPod. Thanks. After a mandatory reboot, and a lockup of iTunes and the iPod updater, I finally got the software updated. Or so I thought – more on that later.

Now it’s all about getting the shoe and the dot thing (iDot?) happily in my shoe. I’ve long been an evangelist for the old Nike Triax system, but wow.



Look at the size difference.



Maybe now I’ll run faster :) The other bonus is that maybe I can wear a regular watch, too. The Triax system uses its own digital watch. One downside is that the iSweat doesn’t support the heartrate monitor that the Triax system uses – maybe in a later incarnation.

Now I didn’t buy the special iSweat shoes, but I’ve seen a lot of people use Velcro or tape to get the iDot stable, so I didn’t think I needed to. I liked the idea of Velcro, so I went that way.

A little trim to fit and voila!






I decided to sew the Velcro strip to the shoe just in case – I really should have gotten two kinds of Velcro – the sticky kind for the iDot and non-sticky for the shoe, because sewing through the sticky led to much grief and sadness.

But, the attaching seemed to work out in the end.

The software and the iPod itself – not so much. I wrote this about 6 or 7 hours after I started to get all of this together. I think I’ve finally figured out what happened. The original update didn’t go through somehow. Maybe it was part of the whole wiped iPod effect. Anyway, it seemed that the iPod thought it was all scrubby-cleany, but wasn’t. All the music and such were gone from the iPod, and it showed the new update, so I thought it was good too. The problem must be with the computer, right?

The computer could only see that there was a kind of a hard drive there, but nothing else. I tried reinstalling just about everything several times and rebooted until my foot was sore. I ran into the ‘Service cannot be deleted’ error (I still don’t know what that means). I ran into the ‘iPod cannot be mounted error’ (which at least makes sense), and much more amusment. So it came down to me finally figuring out that everything on the computer was fine. It was something about the iPod. Thing was that the updater would lock up the computer when it tried to talk to the iPod and Windows couldn’t even open up the hard drive that it thought it saw. The trick was that windows did give the drive a letter. So, back to the dark ages with you! I opened up a dos prompt (they aren’t actually still called that, are they?) and did a ‘Format E:’ it took a really long time, but eventually did format the whole thing. One more crash out of the updater and the second try, it worked! Unfortunately, it’s too late now to go running.

Overall, the install was not smooth. I know this was supposed to be designed to work well with Windows, but it just didn’t (for me anyway). Maybe this is my reward for saying nasty things about Macs. Frankly, I think it confirms my point. Mac software is luscious when it works, but when it breaks, it never seems flexible enough to pull together. It’s a good thing that I’m easy to please in the end. If the thing will work eventually, I’ll be happy. I really want to love this thing.