Clutter is what I do best, by the looks of things. This morning I spent some time doing a visualization exercise on my cluttered past and I came to the conclusion that I never got much guidance as a child in how to organize my belongings. OK, that was then. What am I going to do about this crapitation of clutter today?
I know! I need a mentor! And what better place to find a mentor than in a book! Recalling something that Merlin wrote I decided to get It’s All Too Much: An Easy Plan for Living a Richer Life with Less Stuff
THEN I HAD A REAL FLASH OF BRILLIANCE. Since I have the free Stanza e-reader on my iPhone–which is supposedly a kick-ass reader but I don’t really know because I’ve never used it, but this is as good a time to start as any so–why not download the book? That would be a wicked-great way to start reducing clutter now.
It takes a little fiddling to set up a Stanza account, and then set up a stanza.fictionwise.com account, purchase a book and download it, but hey it’s all saving time and gasoline. UNTIL I TRY DOWNLOADING THE BOOK ON MY IPHONE AND GET THIS ERROR: “unable to parse NCX data from zip.” WTF?
By now I’m seriously on a yak-shaving expedition.
The official Stanza explanation seems to be that Stanza can’t handle all books in the eReader .pdb format. Their solution: DOWNLOAD THE FREE eREADER APP AND USE THAT!!?! I suppose this has something to do with eReader DRM (which requires the original credit card # to unlock the file…I wonder where that credit card number is stored…in the ebook file? Yikes!)
(But wait, Stanza hints that an update is coming soon.)
Maybe “soon” means yesterday. Who knows. Let’s see if there’s an update available now. My iPhone says “no” but iTunes says “yes.”
So NOW I’M TRYING TO UPDATE STANZA. Might as well update my music selection while I’m at it, which means fiddling with Smart Playlists because my other playlists are too big (you know, I’ve got a lot of dups that I should clear out one of these days…) and causing a sync error which won’t let me update Stanza.
This is painful.
OK, screw the music. I selected “don’t update music” and onward we go.
BINGO! That did the trick! For some reason the App app on my iPhone hadn’t alerted me to the fact that there was a Stanza update available.
Bottom line: Stanza 1.7 fixes the “unable to parse NCX data from zip” error. And now I have a very clean yak.