atomicthoughts.com

You might think I had more interesting things to write about than itunes, but you would be wrong. And it’s just so easy to pick on this thing, supposedly designed by some of the best usability people in the world.

Here’s today’s annoyance:

First of all, and I know it’s a total nitpick, but what kind of stupid labels are those for the buttons? What am I supposed to get by pressing “MP3 CD”? I can infer it’s the opposite of “Cancel”, but how about putting a little more thought into it?

More importantly, why not tell me how many discs more than one I need?

Tonights load of laundry was full of:

Isaac’s clothes, full of urine: We’re still working on the potty training at night
My shirt, also urine: It’s not a real party until someone gets peed on. And it wasn’t even my own kid.
Jane’s clothes, sprinkled with vomit: A 103 degree fever came out of nowhere, as did her lunch and dinner.

Today is the gnashing of the teeth, crying in the tea, wailing against the wind phase of development, wherein I make my perfectly wonderful application work in IE.

Ah, another week, another dot release for itunes. Each week as I go through the update process I wonder the same things:

• Why do I have to download 40mb of executable every time I go through this stupid process? Why can’t Apple have inline product updates like so many other pieces of software? If opensource firefox can figure it out, why can’t they?
• What exactly has changed between x.x.2 and x.x.3? What is the value in obfuscating it?
• I wonder if this one will be any more stable? (The answer to this is always no).

Why do I keep using iTunes? Mostly inertia. And the ways in which it’s unstable are vaguely annoying but not enough to move me on. And I’m still recovering from the hundreds of hours I spent playing with different mp3 players, many moons ago. :)

viksoe.dk – GMail Drive shell extension

This is way too cool. A tiny shell extension for Windows XP that lets you use your gmail account as a disk drive. It shows up on the “Send to” menu when you right click a file. It also shows up as a drive from “My Computer”. It looks like you can only move files on and off, you can’t write to it directly. This is a nice simple way to help me keep little things in sync between work and home.

One of my favorite excuses from the kids, and one I’ve admitted using in jest as an adult, is of the form:

“Are you splashing around in there?”
“No! The water is splashing.”

I don’t know what’s stranger; that our TiVo records every showing of “So I Married an Axe Murderer” that comes on, or that it’s on like a dozen times a week.

What do we own except the right to crawl?

It’s always interesting to see how you can change a question in the way you phrase it. Tonight I was doing a phone poll about various things, starting with “Do you think George Bush is doing a good job?” or something like that. Later on, one of the questions was, “Do you support freedom of speech, or do you support campaign reform?” What the hell?

Cassandra and I were talking about something and Jane chimed in, halfway through.

“What are you guys talking about?”
“We’re trying to decide where to leave you after school.”, I said.

It was apparently too early in the morning for joking because she got very sad and started to pout a little, “You can’t just LEAVE me somewhere!”

Cassandra said, “Oh honey, Daddy was just kidding.”

So I hugged my daughter tight and said, “Of course I was kidding honey. We would never just leave you somewhere. We would sell you first.”

:)