Save The Bay

A week ago I went on a Save The Bay cleanup.   It was a good experience.  Just two of us collected about fifteen pounds of garbage!  It was mostly plastic, Styrofoam cups, and other debris.  Wow, we humans are quite messy.

I recommend any kind of clean-the-environment type of experience.  Good exercise and cleans the environment.

 

My blog’s 2011 in review

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2011 annual report for this blog.

Here’s an excerpt:

The concert hall at the Syndey Opera House holds 2,700 people. This blog was viewed about 37,000 times in 2011. If it were a concert at Sydney Opera House, it would take about 14 sold-out performances for that many people to see it.

Click here to see the complete report.

The pain of not using simple file storage locations

There is a special torture in computing nowadays.  Its the managed content syndrome.  Your media applications want to manage what you own.  Thus, a music player only knows about Playlists.  That’s fine.  Especially for the casual computer user who doesn’t know where Word stores their files.  But, if you know what a directory tree is and what storage devices are in your system, this can get in the way.   And what is with this Sync business?  Everything wants to sync and share and play.

What got me in a grumpy mood is using ITunes to get a new CD into my iPhone.  Can’t do it.  What ticked me off is clicking the “Manually manage music and videos” on the Summary page.  To me that sentence would mean that I do the copy and paste and all that.  I determine what gets done.  Nope, as soon as you click that you eventually have to click “Apply” at some point, then the bizarre pop up comes up:

The iPhone xxxx is synced with another iTunes library.  Do you want to erase this iPhone and sync with this iTunes library?   An iPhone can only be synced with only one iTunes library at a time…..

Huh, didn’t I just say I wanted to manage my stuff?  I don’t want to sync.  I just want to copy stuff from the file system to the iPhone.  Maybe its some Apple acolyte language?  DRM stuff?   I don’t get it.  Anyway, if I cancel, I still cannot copy a CD I just imported into my playlist on the iPhone.  I searched onLine for some help and don’t see anything yet.  Don’t tell me RTFM, its useless.  Maybe you have to be an Apple user?  I’m not, Windows 7 is nice!  Even Ubuntu is good enough and no price premium for alleged “useabillity”.

Apple is not the only company with this insanity, try using Windows Media Center to just play a video that you know where exactly it is on your networked drive.  Nope, you first have to create a media location and so forth.  And, horrors of horrors, it too wants to search all over the place for stuff and sync and share and frolic and piss me off.

1, 2, 3, 4, 5, …..

P.S.  Forgot to mention that Windows Media Player by default will erase your music file from storage if you remove it from your playlist.  What!!!

Updates

June 9, 2010:  Now I’m trying to create a slideshow based on a directory tree of pictures I have.  You’d think that all image software would know how to recurse directories and all that.  Nope!  Some of them just want you to copy everything you have into one subdirectory.  This is insane.  I looked at Irfanview, but its requires creation of batch files and other gory details.  Right now I’m running the Microsoft PowerToy “Slide Show Wizard”.  Its just sitting there, no indication of what its doing, just the image of a piece of paper flying from one folder to another, so, what is going on, couldn’t they have placed a simple button to optionally show details or just have a console view of what is happening.  .

Read it Later Digest

Read it Later Digest is beautiful, smart, and easy!*  What it does is take the addresses you saved to read later, sorts them into categories, and then creates a web page just for you.  Doesn’t sound like much and other sites like Delicious do similar.  True, but this one looks nice and the categorizing is automatic.

So, since I put the addresses in there myself, of course I’m interested in them.  Thus, its like a custom magazine.   Now that is using technology to really save time and leverage its capabilities.

Of course, social is the new chic.  You can make the Digest public and share it with others.

One thing that this application shares with many “Web 2.0″ efforts is that the categorization is not perfect.  For example, I have a link to a Groovy language article, but Digest categorized this as Business.  Not major.  Until the web gets Semantic, we get only data, the information humans will still have to supply.  I wonder is there is anyway to give the Digest hints or more info on what certain pages are about.  Alas, if we could all just mark our pages with RDFa …

* If I were crude, I would say that describes a perfect date.

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