Nobrainer’s Think Tank

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…)

After the Great Comcast Disaster of ‘06, I gave my old, extra router to my girlfriend. It’s been running just fine for months and now her roommate wants to plug into it. And she wants the installation software for the router. I told her something along the lines of, “I probably have it, but you totally don’t need it to connect. I’ve never used it.”

She insisted that computers can’t connect through a router unless that router’s software is installed.

Had she not been so insistent, I might have suggested that she just needed to restart the router. But who am I to keep her from the fun of looking up the router manufacturer; finding, downloading, and installing the software; and then rewiring everything… and then restarting the router.

[the extra technical details: (more…)

What’s wrong with this picture? No one figured it out, so I’ll you.

Apple.

Apple is what’s wrong with my desktop. Apple may make a mean OS and pretty computer, but they release pure crap to us Windows-using crowd.

Sunday it was time for my Apple software to update itself. It began by downloading Quicktime and iTunes + Quicktime. Then it installed Quicktime and iTunes + Quicktime. And it added shortcuts to my desktop, my quick launch bar, and my system tray. Thank you very much. That stuff is bad enough with a new install, but it is intolerable in an upgrade. Most other programs at least ask me if I want such things, or are designed well enough to assume that my previous preferences still exist.

And what’s worse, is that Apple is always presented as being sleek and minimalist and elegant, a point about which Microsoft skewered themselves for being at the other extreme.

Yet for some reason Apple abandons that philosophy when dealing directly with someone who could be a potential customer. Bastards.

[Yeah, I know. Apple is getting better in a lot of ways, but they still stick to some stupid habits, and they are also starting to learn some Microsoft-isms due to their newfound popularity.]

PS - The upgrade seems to have been marginally worth it. The Ctrl-click problems have been lessened. Now I can select up to 10, maybe 12 songs at once provided I do it very slowly.

Additional complaints about Apple and their iPods in the continuation: (more…)

The above animation appears when the new Yahoo! Mail is loading.

Let’s just say that the first time I saw it I didn’t think it depicted one of those old exerciser belt thingamajigs.

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.

I’ve roamed my way down through Charlotte and Clemson and landed in Athens for a brief period to catch some college baseball (go Beavers!) It’s been a trip full of crazy drivers, good baseball, and extremely good food (barbecue, brats, and filet mignon). I’ll add more on all that later.

Some of you may have noticed that the blog went through some upgrades lately. In addition to getting up to date with the latest WordPress software, I changed a lot of the underlying theme code in both this blog and the Sporting Gnomes. You probably won’t notice much difference with the Gnomes site, where I mostly cleaned up a bunch of loose ends. On here, however, I made a lot of changes with respect to CSS and how things loaded. Hopefully the important things will load a little faster and everything will look a bit less cluttered. Please let me know if you notice any issues or just find the changes to be unbearable.

As time and creativity permit, I think things will eventually morph into an entirely new theme. We’ll see how it goes. Got any ideas?