Audiobooks on the Run (3)

As reported last week I continue enjoying my daily physical activity. The Autumn has not been bad at all, actually it is beautiful and magical in the woods. And I continue to spice my trail runs with audiobooks - took advantage of the Amazon Prime day and bought a deeply discounted annual Audible subscription. 

The Bose Frames are phenomenal. Although - I admit - they result in some funny situations. One morning before dawn I met a park ranger. He looked at me asking "why do you wear sunglasses walking in the woods in the night?". "I use them to listen to books". He did not look convinced. Books you read, not listen to (in general). And even if you listen, you use headphones, not glasses. And wearing sunglasses in the night appears awkward to say the least. Conventional thinking :) If it is dark, it does not matter if you wear dark glasses or transparent ones :). Generally it is complicated to explain to "ordinary" people.

The iPod Nano has been a great Bluetooth audiobook player. Except that it started choking on chapter 84 of The Stand by Stephen King (the greatest novel to read during a pandemic!). After several exchanges with Audible support (I had to explain to them what iPod Nano was...), they confirmed:

We are aware of the issue you’re having with. To minimize any inconvenience, we’ll get back to you within two business days with more information

This was two weeks ago and they have never come back despite the promise. I finished the book using another MP3 player in the meantime... Now I'm on Part 2 of The Dark Tower and it works fine. Clearly there was an issue with the AAX file for "The Stand". Pity Audible have been so sluggish reacting...

In the meantime Garmin declined to reproduce the issue of not being able to simultaneously record a GPS activity and stream audio over Bluetooth. They offered to RMA replace my unit instead.. It has been two weeks now when I'm not recording any runs. I don't think the new unit will magically fix the software problem, but following the procedures is probably the only way to deal with support. It is annoying because of the time and effort one needs to invest to convince the vendor they have a bug (=a software quality issue). You need to go through multiple factory resets, lose your data, restore it. report to them it did not help, send the unit for RMA (resulting in not being able to use it for some time) etc. But it is what it is. One day I will make a fortune after my resume for a QA engineer position is accepted :)