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.
Share This
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.
Share This
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?
Share This
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.
Share This
Sometimes I think it would be cool to work for Google, but I’d worry about becoming a zombie.
Share This
My TiVo’s hard drive died last weekend. I’d owned it less than a year. This is quite common, of course, as a TiVo is just a computer, and computers’ hard drives fail. I bought a cheap, bare drive from Newegg, burned an image with InstantCake, and spent too much money at the hardware store on a Torx set to install the new drive. (Why do computer components use Torx screws?!) However, the biggest pain in the entire process was going through the guided setup again: setting my lineup, setting up the control of the cable box, etc. And I lost all my Season Pass settings.
But it got me to wondering: Why doesn’t TiVo store the box’s settings online? My TiVo is networked and “calls home” every 15 minutes or so. TiVo.com stores the device ID of my box. Why couldn’t the TiVo pass back my season passes and lineup info? I’m not even asking for web management of Season Passes and the To Do List; I’d just like to have the main box info backed up remotely. Seems easy enough.
Share This
“But I’m not happy about it” — brilliant.
Share This
