Andrew's 'New' Toy

Last night before bed, we were talking and the subject "Things Andrew Used to Say" came up. I mentioned that I bought a Sansa Express (SE) years ago with the idea that I would use it to record Andrew from time to time; like when he was strapped in his car seat on road trips. Even though it was late, I decided to get it out and show Andrew. After showing him how to use it, he got very excited and started making recordings one after another, and sure enough, the bedtime rule was broken once again, thanks to me. :)

He'd run into his bedroom, talk into the SE for about a minute, then run back into our room so we could play his recording on the laptop. One time I went with him and we watched lightning flash in the western sky. He made about a dozen recordings before we finally calmed him back down and got him in bed.

This morning, after the shuttle launch was scrubbed, I tried removing the songs from the SE to make more room for Andrew's recordings. Somehow, his recordings were also removed in the process. Note to self - never use the Windows Media Player Sync option for removing items from the SE.

When Andrew got up, he quickly picked up where he left off last night and started making new recordings. He was up to another dozen before I left to go fly - that's another story - and was up to seventeen when I returned.

While we were listening to number seventeen, something went wrong. The laptop no longer recognized the SE as either a music player or a storage device. I was unable to get it to respond at all, other than a quick SanDisk message followed by a blank screen. The techno-geek in me would not be defeated by bad software without a fight, so I went to Google and started searching for a solution. Sure enough, many people experienced similar behavior. I tried several solutions before hitting on one that actually made the situation slightly better. From this point, I was able to install a newer firmware onto the SE. Unfortunately, installing firmware wipes the memory clean in the process.

With new firmware installed, the Sansa Updater program, which now worked properly, informed me that there was an even newer version of firmware available, so I tried installing it. The update hung and refused to budge. Back to square two again (in square one, nothing worked). So, I repeated some of my earlier steps and managed to get the latest firmware installed. Finally, everything was working as it should.

But then I had to break the news on Andrew; that all of his recordings were gone, deleted. He was heartbroken. Between sobs, I heard, "Where did they go? Can't we just play them from there again? I don't want them to be gone!" Oh, how he wailed. He told me that he'd rather have it broken WITH the recordings than fixed WITHOUT them. I explained to him that with it broken, the recordings were stuck on the SE and we had no way of copying them to the computer. He finally calmed down and and moved onto something more appealing: he started watching Star Wars Episode 3.

Hopefully, later today, I can get him excited about making recordings again. I really wanted to post a few here. I did manage to save one and here it is: