Nobrainer’s Think Tank

Last night I wrote — and somehow deleted — a review and warning about Philips compact fluorescent light bulbs.

With the original post gone and not feeling like writing it again. I will summarize briefly.

Philips CFBs are shitty. They take forever to warm up and then they can even start buzzing. That is great if your house happens to be a high school gymnasium. Since it probably isn’t, stick with GE bulbs. They’re worth it.

Speaking of being worth it, suck up your pride and go to Wal-Mart to get your GE CFBs. You’ll probably be able to buy 2 or 3 times as many bulbs for the money.

That may be the best way to describe the taste of Listerine Whitening® Pre-Brush Rinse.

Whether or not the product actually whitens, it has a major drawback: during use, it very quickly picks up the taste of all the stuff that you don’t want in your mouth anymore. Therefore you spend a minute rinsing and being uncomfortably aware of just how dirty your mouth is.

The emerging rule in my life is that the only things less reliable than my old American car and Windows PCs are my iPod and iTunes.

Today, the less-than-six-month-old iPod iPiece-of-shit has decided to crash. And I mean really crash. As in it has to be totally reformatted.

Whereas iTunes used to recognize my iPiece as “Nobrainer,” is is now once again just a corrupted “iPod.”

So how does one go about reformatting an iPod? Or even turning off a iPiece? Well I’m sure iTunes will help. (more…)

I’m very happy that Apple, which likes to pretend that it always gets things right the first time, releases upgrades to iPod firmware.

You see, my nano simply didn’t work right. I was supposed to be able to hold down the center button to add a song/album/artist to the on-the-go playlist. But it only worked for individual songs.

Now, months later, my problem is fixed. Woohoo.

All-in-all I think the iPod is ok. It’s a really cool little gadget, but I feel it adds between very little and absolutely zero value to my life. It is simple to operate, but I often find myself wishing I could perform simple operations such as deleting a song from a playlist. For as nice as it is to have a lot of music to carry with me in a tiny package, I find myself spending far too much time thinking about what I might want to listen to later on as well as updating artist and album info.

If I didn’t know that the people who got it for me would ask me how I liked it, and if it weren’t personalized with their company name, I would sell the damn thing. $150 in my IRA is worth much more to me than some little device which separates myself from my thoughts. $150 is not more important than upsetting my employer.

For reference, I spent >$200 on a 19″ LCD monitor for my desktop. It’s so worth it that I can’t wait to get a 2nd one hooked up. I also spent ~$200 on a universal remote, which I still consider to be a sound purchase.

And with the iPod came my switch from WinAmp to iTunes. WinAmp was kinda crappy but I was used to it. iTunes is better (than WinAmp and even the new WMP), but still I don’t find all that much to love.

The automatic download of podcasts is great. I really like that (although I’m sure there are similar other ways to do it without iTunes).

Other than that, I don’t particularly like the layout and I maintain hatred for the faux sleek styling. It’s not good at finding album artwork. More often than not, I find it to be sluggish and confusing. I’m not sure that any of it is particularly intuitive, and lot of it runs counter to my years of windows training. It is particularly bad at ctrl+click operations. But then again, I’ve hated QuickTime and iTunes since I first experienced them.

In brief summary, the value of the iPod is in its “wow,” and “I have one, too” factors. I’m still amazed that such a tiny thing has a color screen and holds eons of music. But that doesn’t mean it’s even remotely a necessity.