Every so often I become completely exhausted and am unable to function in any productive manner. Sometimes this lasts for hours and other times it lasts for days. During this exhaustion period, I actively avoid the plateful of tasks that I need to accomplish and instead go surf on the Web-o-trons. Of course this doesn’t really give me rest; indeed, it is more exhausting because I’m stressed about all the work I’m avoiding. For my surfinations, I usually start out at some software project that is interesting and end up on some strange blog and while away much time reading the backlogs. This, then, is my journey:

• MINIX 3
• MINIX Tips
• Bluish Coder
• Neil Mix
• Joel on Software
• jobs.joelonsoftware.com
• The Show with zefrank (previously discovered but now rediscovered)

Also, I wanted to point out a couple of things located on my secondary server, Amnesty. The main server, Anthere, is what hosts important things (like this blog) which need to have a measure of permanency and uptime. Amnesty is my dev server and playbox and lives here with me in Omaha. (My ISP here blocks on port 80, which is why you need to hit 8080 to get there) Anyway, I bring it up because it has two things which you may find useful. First there is the upload, a convenient storebox for you to place things right quick, like an image or document you need to share with someone really fast (“Hey man, check out this picture.” or “Watch this video.”). Second is the pastebin, running a pastebin that somebody wrote and posted the source code for. The pastebin serves a similar purpose: if you have a bit of text that you need to share with somebody or whatnot, put ‘er there right quick. I’ve been using it to copy and paste between computers and put links when I’m not at my computer. It’s like emailing stuff to yourself only more accessible. Feel free to share those links with people, but I should stress that nothing put there has any permanency, it might be deleted at any time.

As I was sitting here on our porch (which *BZZT* ohmy I hate iTunes 7 so much. It is the epitomy of SUCK and feature bloat. I was trying to type and it was sucking up 100% of my CPU so that my typing was delayed while it… well, I don’t know what it was doing, processing something for its much-vaunted gapless playback or something equally useless; playback which, may I note, may or may not be gapless, I can’t actually tell what gaps they are no longer playing back to me, presumably they are now gone, which I guess I’m thankful for, you know, but when I have to actively STOP what I’m doing for TEN MINUTES while background software does processing for a hyped-up feature that I CAN’T TELL what it does, that makes me very angry. Apple, listen: Stop.

A brief history of iTunes:

iTunes 1

Initial release. People were intrigued but there was no reason to switch from other players… yet.

iTunes 2

Added some new features, generally made the thing suck a lot less. It became usable and added support for portable music players, and Carbon support so it ran under OS X.

iTunes 3

OH WOW smart playlists based on ratings and playcounts? I’ll pay a hundred dollars. It’s FREE? NO WAY I HAVE TO HAVE IT NOW. These are the features that switched me over from Audion, which I think cost $20.

iTunes 4

Music Store. Music sharing. ‘Nuff said.

iTunes 5

Update of the interface to the… err, well, what are we calling this? The second verison of brushed metal, without the metal or the brushing. Gradient Gray? It was around for about a month.

iTunes 6

I think this was the video store? Right? Useful features: none.

iTunes 7

Redesigned the interface AGAIN, breaking yet once again from what few standards were left and making their own thing which sucks and is based off the Pro application color scheme, which is strange because iTunes is not a Pro app. Added cover flow… pretty but not useful at all. Added some other things and some other bunch of features which I don’t remember because they aren’t relevant to anything. Oh, they did update the iPod interface, which is actually useful, but they sort of forgot to hype that part.

I’m sorry, but are you seeing the same sad trend I’m seeing here? iTunes 4 was the last version that actually added genuinely new things. Now we’re in feature bloat territory.

That aside was not planned. Earlier, when I was sitting on my porch reading, I looked up and noticed how incredibly nice the lighting/furniture combo on our porch (dubbed The Mezzanine) is. Then I looked out at the quad and got my camera and took some cool long exposure pictures. The attached picture is one of them.

Also, I have recently stumbled upon a rapper named Lecrae. I don’t know if I expressed this to you or not, but I have had a recent growing facination with rap/hip-hop. I like it. But I haven’t really gotten into it because the lyrical content almost literally causes me to retch. Lecrae produces actual gangsta rap but with a message praising God. This is distinct from most so-called “Christian” music which is different from “mainstream” music only in that it contains no swearing. Lecrae is concerned with preaching the Gospel and I can’t stop listening to it. It’s so good.

This entry was posted on Sunday, October 1st, 2006 at 10:05 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.