jotsheet

Or possibly I suck at chatting. Or maybe I’ve outgrown it. Either way, I don’t enjoy it.

I tried chatting the other night, and my first problem was that I had no idea where to go. Where do people chat? AOL? IRC? Yahoo? I tried Yahoo chat, and it completely sucked. It was infested by spambots, and the actual people there had nothing interesting to say. Add to that the fact that Yahoo has voice chat, which lets people say stupid things instead of type stupid things, and it’s a truly terrible situation.

I think back to my dark days as a 12 year-old addicted to IRC, and I remember how exciting it was to chat with random people on the Internet. Is anyone still excited by that? Seriously, who the hell wants to talk to a random person on the Internet?

My suspicion is that people today get their fix of superficial, bite-sized interactions via text messaging, Facebook and Myspace messages, and Twitter (guhhh). Have these similar superficial modes of interaction killed chat? If so, I can’t say I mind.

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iTunes is a piece of shit. I hate it. It’s slow, it’s a RAM hog, and its constant self-updating is both annoying and destructive (as noted by Dennis Kennedy). Of course, this is to say nothing of my disdain for the iPod.

But I do own an iPod, and I did use iTunes to rip my CD collection, so I’d been using iTunes to play the AAC and M4P files–until now.

My favorite little Winamp replacement, Quintessential Player, has a plugin for playing AAC/M4P files. Get it from RareWares. Then you needn’t use Microsoft’s abominable resource hog (Windows Media Player) or Apple’s abominable resource hog (iTunes). You get to use a fast, skinnable little player, and you feel extra special nerdy cool while you do it.

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I don’t watch the local nightly news. It’s a poor way to find out what’s going on: the stories are superficial, the program is interrupted by commercial breaks, and it’s a completely non-interactive medium.

But the worst part about the nightly news is the obligatory “man on the street” interview. This is a classic–and seemingly mandatory–component of any story with a local focus (and some with a national focus–that can make for even dumber commentary).

Consider the following story about luggage falling from a plane at Midway airport. The plane took off, the cargo doors weren’t secured, and two bags fell out. CBS2 Chicago saw fit to interview several passengers (maybe relevant) and area residents (not insightful) about the situation. Here’s Idiot #1, a passenger:

“That’s scary. It should be more secured, more secured than that. Shouldn’t nothing be flying off the plane. Shouldn’t be no doors open. Everything should be secure,” Delta passenger Phyllis Abram said.

“Shouldn’t nothing be flying off the plane?” Ya think?! This is commentary worthy of publication?! How about Idiot #1, an area resident:

“You’d be driving by and luggage hits you… that would be real crazy,” area resident Martin Vasquez said.

Thanks, Martin. Very insightful.

Simply put, the local news team needs to stop talking to the locals.

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I’m offended when people do stupid things for no reason. People can do stupid things for stupid reasons, and that’s bothersome. People can do good things for stupid reasons, and that’s fine. But I can’t stand the stupid things-no reason combination.

About 10 o’clock or so each weekday morn, I stroll over to the john to take care of the morning’s coffee. Without fail, each morning I find at least one, sometimes more than one piece of used chewing gum staring back at me from the urinal mat. Why, I ask myself each morning, am I looking at piece of chewing gum? Is the spitter of the chewing gum unaware that:

• a trash can stands a scant 10 feet away, directly adjacent to the sink he’s (hopefully) about to use to wash his hands, and
• some poor guy has to pick that gum out of urinal!

And I guess that’s the problem: there’s no reason to discard chewing gum in the urinal, but for a person to realize there’s no reason, he has to think to think. And that’s where the real problem is. I find it depressing.

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1. Go to Jewel, preferably during a busy time. Saturday afternoon works well.
2. Walk to the liquor section. Select your favorite variety of beer, wine, or spirits.
3. Go to the self checkout line.
4. Wait for the Jewel employee in charge of the self checkout area to become distracted. This happens regularly.
5. Scan the alcohol. The system will say that approval is needed.
6. Approval is not needed. Swipe your credit card.
7. The system will exit out of the “needs approval” screen and into the “choose your payment type” screen.
8. Finish paying.
9. Walk out.

I’m 90% certain the system works this way. I’ll try it again next time I’m at the grocery store. Have fun, teenagers.

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The tip first. If you live in Chicago and use the “L,” you might be famliar with Ed Kinittel’s CTA map. I’m a big fan. But what you might not be familiar with is the Firefox search engine add-on, written by Clay Smith, which adds the map as a search option in the top-right browser search box. You can just type in “900 n michigan” and forget the “chicago, il.” I like it.

And the hassle. Why is script debugging a pain to enable/disable in IE? This is the kind of thing I want to enable/disable via a hotkey, or at least a button. Why has no one created an add-on for it?

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I picked up a useful bit of information this morning. Did you know that you don’t have to burn an ISO image to CD/DVD to access its files? Instead, you can mount the image as a local drive. This is handy because (a) you don’t have to wait to burn the image, (b) you don’t have to waste a DVD/CD, and (c) it’s faster because the files are accessed off the hard drive, not the CD/DVD drive.

Since more and more apps are downloadable as ISOs, I think this will be useful.

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