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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