Rob Voisey gets ready to run a dog-slow recompile of the Rio Music Manager software because I reported a problem with creating playlists.



Perhaps I should explain what I'm doing here, for the benefit of those who are visiting this site who don't know about this side of my life. In my spare time, I'm a beta tester for Rio, the company that made the first portable MP3 player and still makes lots of cool MP3-related gadgets today. I do this for free, all I get in return is to play with all of the newest stuff before it hits the market. But there are other benefits, such as making great friends like Rob. Rob's role, as I understand it, is to be the project manager for all the audio software development for Rio.



He looks a little ragged because it's past 5:00 on the last workday of a very long week where they're trying to button down some software for something very new but still very top secret at the time of this writing. It's Thursday, but tomorrow is day one of the Fourth Annual European Empeg Owner's Meet in Holland, and much of the team is taking a three-day weekend to attend it.



I decided this year I wanted to kill two birds with one stone: See a bunch of Europe, and attend this owner's meet. So that's why we're here.



On the desk beside him is the coveted trophy for the 'worst install' competition at the owner's meet. It's a busted up Empeg Car Mark 1 that doesn't work any more.