Polar, you SUCK

So, Rob bought me a new HR monitor as an early Christmas present, because I was complaining that I couldn't find my M32, and the strap on the F4 was broken. I now have an F55 (the red one), and I was totally psyched about transferring data between my HRM and my computer. Neither of my other monitors could do that.

Until I went to the Polar web tool and actually tried to do it. First, the download page for the Weblink tool was down last night, so I couldn't do anything except play with the Personal Trainer app (which, admittedly, is pretty nice), but with no way to download the workouts to my wrist unit.

This morning, the software download page is back up, but I think I downloaded the wrong thing. At least I hope I did, because the thing I downloaded (Polar UpLink tool, which is what they told me to download when I selected my model) doesn't work. Well, I take that back...it works. It transfers data to the wrist unit. I know it did, because it changed my time from AM to PM.

Trouble is, what I was trying to download was a logo to replace the stupid yin-yang symbol that's the default. I did the transfer, and even though it said it was OK, the logo stayed the same. I've been working with this software a total of 30 minutes between yesterday and today, and already I want to kill myself.

Nice work, Polar.

UPDATE: And if anyone can tell me why my MS150 button over on the sidebar has a transparent background in Firefox but an ugly-ass gray box around it in IE, I'll give you a dollar. Fuck. Stupid software.

UPDATE to the UPDATE: My limited research, along with trial & error, have determined that the problem's related to the type of file I stole from the MS150 site used for the MS150 logo. According to some documents so technical that they may as well have been written in binary (I had to read through one 3 times before I made any sense of it at all), IE doesn't always render transparent PNG files correctly. As with many, many other aspects of the web-browsing experience, Firefox apparently does it better.

I'm not good enough with HTML to be able to figure out how the MS150 site got around the issue, as theirs displays fine in IE. And I tried converting the image to other formats in photoshop, but the gifs looked like crap and I couldn't get anything else to save with a transparent background. Maybe this is the National MS Society's way of discouraging folks from swiping their logo file for their own nefarious (or fundraiser link-making) purposes...I don't know. :) That'll teach me, I guess.

On the F55, when the unit is showing the time, just hold down the upper right button for 2 seconds and the new logo will appear. Do it again, and the yin-yang comes back. If you have a trophy for beating your weekly program you can cycle through all three the same way.

Yay--thanks Mary!

*tries it* okay, that sort of worked. It got rid of the yin-yang, but now there's no logo at all. The uplink must not have worked.

Oh well...I haven't had much time to sit down with the manual, but I think I have the basics down now. I was kind of pissed on Saturday when I wore it for my long ride, though. I thought that when the display went to Exercise, that meant that it started recording. Then I went to review my workout at home and discovered that it just starts monitoring on the first press...you have to hit the select button again to start the exercise session. Sigh...3 hours of riding, and no stats.

I should have known, considering that the more complicated of my earlier two also had a two-button start sequence. I guess I just need to RTFM, eh? :)