Running... Again?

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  If you know me you know there was a time about 10 years ago or so where I was running. A lot. At least 5 days a week and at least 5 miles a run. I wasn’t training, I wasn’t preparing for a race or a marathon. I just found myself enjoying the time spent running. I wasn’t obsessed with numbers, but I kept track of them all and liked seeing improvements in time and distances. It was good physical health and mental health. Then I tweaked my knee. Not bad enough that I couldn’t walk on it, just a tweak that told me I needed to back off of running for a little bit. So I decided on 2 weeks. At the end of 2 weeks I aborted a run very early as the pain was still there. 2 weeks became 3, became a month, became 5 years. 

I Gave In

A year ago the Palm Pre was announced at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, and I was hooked; a slick operating system with matching slick hardware. But what I liked most about it was that it was a cloud phone. There was no need to dock it to my computer to sync contacts between each other, or calendar events it all happened between The Cloud (my Google Accounts) and the phone. Which is what's so neat about The Cloud, my information centrally located and easily accessible by any internet enabled device. I love it. 
But, media synchronization hasn't made the leap yet, really. We're still using iTunes, or Windows Media Player to store and play our music. And in the era of the iPhone we want our phone to do more than just call mom, we want it to play our favorite Ke$ha track, view that crazy YouTube video where the little kid out Jason Mrazs Jason Mraz, or just watch Bat Man while on the train. How to get the media off my computer and on to my phone.
It's not really that hard, just drag the files over to the phone while it's plugged into my computer. But I wanted something that didn't mean I had to constantly tell it what files, I wanted a phone to make use of iTunes' playlists. And when Palm said their Media Sync would work with iTunes I rejoiced. Now I could make Smart playlists, and dumb playlists that would keep in sync with my smart Pre. And in the beginning it was wonderful, then Apple decided they didn't like how Palm went about doing this (basically fooling the computer into thinking it was an iPod. Probably not the best way to do this) and kept shutting down Media Sync with iTunes. I think this happened 3 or 4 times where Apple would make a code change, then Palm a week later would make a change to re-enable Media Sync. Amusing to some point, but a pain for owners.
Well it looks like Palm has finally given in and is no longer trying to make the Pre sync with iTunes. There was a software update not long ago that didn't fix it, so it was time to come up with another way to do this because not letting iTunes update anymore was getting annoying. Option ranged from using a whole different music program (that wouldn't sync my iPods) to finding go between software, which is what I decided on. Mark/Space's Go Gadget is a program that analyzes your iTunes library then lets you pick from it to put on your device. It also looks at my iPhoto libraries to put those on too. It will also format most video files to work on my Pre, and will make and sync ringtones. All in all not bad for $20. 
Now don't get me wrong, this isn't a ringing endorsement for Go Gadget, and not the most elegant solution; I believe if Palm said their product would work a certain way they should make it work that way, but since Palm is being rather quiet about this, I had no other choice. So if I have to buy something, Go Gadget is a good choice to make.

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