The Slick Network

At first glance, I was amazed by the wonderful features of my iHome branded clock radio for my iPod. It had an alarm, iPod charger, and the ability to play my ipod audio directly through the speakers on the unit. It was a dream come true. No longer was required to listen through those little headphones. I was free to listen without boundaries. I decided that work would be a great place to connect my unit. I am at my desk eight hours a day and my company is nice enough to let me listen to music at a reasonable volume level.

After only minutes of the first use, my iPod completely froze and would no longer go into sleep mode. I blamed the iPod for being faulty because it was brand new. I went online and tried to reset the iPod and that didn’t work. After a lengthy call with the helpful Apple associate, I was told to go home and reinstall the updated iPod software. That didn’t work, so I had to send my iPod in for repair. About two week later I had a refurbished iPod. It totally sucks because my iPod was just one week old when it stopped working. I was just happy to have an iPod that worked , so the following Monday, I connected my “refurb” iPod into my iHome. My iPod now freezes after about three songs and then I have to reboot my iPod in order to get it to play. It is a newer generation Video iPod, so I thought that maybe it was just a little “buggy”. I waited for the new firmware to be released because it promised to fix several bugs. The following Monday I connected the iPod to the iHome and it began freezeing again. I doesn’t freeze once or twice a day…it freezes like 20 or 30 times a day. I have a $10 set of computer speakers that I got from Walmart and my iPod never freezes when I connect it to those speakers.

I went to the iHome forums and all I could find is that it says that you may run into interference when connected next to a computer or monitor. I have three dell flat panel monitors connected to two computers at work, so possibly it could be that. It is just a sad thing that I lost my receipt and am unable to return the $89 paper weight. The clock radio sounds great , but I can hook up a $10 clock radio if that’s what I wanted.

Let me know if anyone else runs into the same problem or has a solution for me. This was a promising product that has just totally let me down.

I would not buy this product again, but that is only my opinion. Maybe I just have a defective unit.

 

Many people visit the popular social bookmark site called Digg.com .  I find it to be one of the best solutions for finding interesting news articles without having to search around.  One of the most disappointing things about Digg is that once a site becomes popular enough to hit the frontpage, it gets slammed with traffic and often crashes.  This leaves many frontpage stories that lead to error pages.  This leaves me with only one option…to digg the story ,so I can save it to view it later.  I know that digg allows you to undigg stories, so I could digg and then just undigg later.  That just seems like it would eventually just leave thousands of people digging a story that they haven’t even had a chance to read. 

My solution would be to create a “saved bookmark button” without a vote and it could hold those stories in your profile section.   You would then be able to read the article after the craze of the Digg Effect has died down a little.  Once you read the story, you could choose to delete or digg it. 

Below is an example of how it could be incorportated in to the site.

 

 

 

 

 

It is quite a simple solution, but I am sure that the programming behind it is more complex than it seems. Digg is constantly adding wonderful features that ”wow” the users, but this would be a simple solution that could bypass the need to start a service to cache a website for later viewing.  I miss out on getting a chance to see many of the stories that make it to the frontpage , so this would really be a wonderful feature to try out.