saturn return to sender

- one of these days i’m going to perturb or even mildly upset several people by taking down the 10 or so images on this server which said people hotlink. behold my terrible power!

- i use Synergy for its keyboard shortcuts to iTunes’ stop and next commands and the little MTV-style box it pops up at the start of every song. it displays the album cover along with the song name and artist and so forth, but it often gets confused and displays the wrong cover, with occasionally hilarious (okay: mildly amusing) results. Stone Temple Pilots for Vienna Teng. Kelis for Zero 7. Bach for a particularly tortured and jittery Bjork remix. Eric Clapton for DJ Shadow. and so on.

- speaking of iTunes, it fucking brainwashed my iPod the other day due to what has got to be one of the worst interface designs Apple has created. i manually manage my iPod’s music because i can’t spare the space on any of my machines for the number of CDs i want available. my iPod is my portable music library that can be plugged in wherever i’m working. but iTunes’ default behavior is to synch your Mac’s library with your iPod so if you don’t want your music pointlessly replicated in three places you have to proactively make iTunes keep its hands off.

but so sometimes something goes screwy and iTunes will think my iPod is new or something and will offer the new iPod setup dialogs when i plug it in. that’s okay. not good, but it doesn’t destroy any data, so only mildly perturbing. UNLESS you’re rushed and forget to uncheck the “manage my music for me” checkbox before telling iTunes that, yes yes you are correct, this is an iPod. THEN iTunes will — without warning — synch your iPod with your local library, meaning that any songs on your iPod which do not happen to reside in the library on the computer you happen to be using ARE E-FUCKING-RASED.

maybe this is some DRM-related behavior that was negotiated with Big Music but i don’t care: it’s inexcusable to erase a user’s data as a side effect of another operation without asking for confirmation. what the hell are they thinking?

i checked and the files are still on the iPod; i’m hoping to find a free unerase utility.

- i finished the most hellish studio ever yesterday afternoon. it was hellish for reasons that were not due to the school or the curriculum. but more to the point, someone ordered three extra pitchers of margarita last night and i am still mildly tipsy this morning.

- i have a sudden desire to play melancholy songs on a piano. i’ve hardly touched a piano for years. i wonder what my fingers remember.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 6th, 2006 at 11:30 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.