Okay, so iTunes is really starting to get on my nerves.

It was already on my nerves because it seems to be incredibly slow. Even on my new spiffy mega-mondo desktop it feels bloated–it's got that bad-comedian-in-a-fat-suit slowness going on. I was all excited at the prospect of a 64-bit iTunes…but after running it for a while I wondered why it had gotten slow again. Then I discovered that the installer was the only 64-bit part. The regular iTunes was still 32. Now I'm not a technical guy (not anymore–I don't count myself in that particular club) but why in the hell would you want the installer to be 64-bit? The only reason I can come up with is that the 32-bit version wasn't playing nice with a 64-bit OS.

Anyway, so that was annoying.

Now I found today I had somehow turned on a feechur I'd never witnessed before nor desired: that of "album ratings." I have MP3s that I've pulled in from God knows where–a lot of old-time radio files, audiobooks and other things. As a result, I am missing a lot of artist and album titles (which I use this previously mentioned method to go through on the run).

[[ Continued ]]

So here's a free idea for you: there's money to be made in somebody who can make a full-on search function that works as a no-brainer, quickly addresses any issues or bugs, and doesn't scare the shit out of you with their privacy policy.

Basically, if there is somebody that does this, they need to fire their SEO person, because I sure as hell can't find them through Google.

Here's the deal: in general, everybody's got way too much crap on their hard drives. You can buy a USB stick that's 400 times the size of the first hard drive I ever owned for $10. You can literally have a terabyte of storage on your desktop for relatively nothing. Hell, the new mondo desktop I bought has 750GB of storage on it. And I have a 500GB external drive just for my music and other backup purposes. Bottom line: storage has gotten stupid-silly and we're all now digital packrats.

I don't know about you, but I can't find my bloody car keys. So the prospect of 750GB of potential space in which to lose something is rather terrifying. And let's face it: the stuff is in a sort of quantum lost state–we know it's in there. It's not like it vanished. But we can't possibly tell you where. It might as well be etched on a rock off the coast of Malaysia unless you can lay hands upon it. (And I can't tell you how much I want some smartass with a smartphone to send me a pic of them standing on a rock off the coast of Malaysia.)

[[ More this way ]]

I have to say, I really appreciate Gmail. I have one account that I use for filtering spam and another account I use for reading material on my phone. Anytime I find a slightly long article that I'd like to read, I just send it to myself on my mobile Gmail account .

I've even stopped using the mobile version of the Gmail browser client. It doesn't support pictures in messages and besides, my connection is fast enough that the regular version works just fine.

Hell, I'd use Gmail for all my mail stuff if it didn't have that obnoxious tendency to bind emails together in a conversation that cannot be undone.

Maybe one of these days.

Sent from phone.

So Earthlink has gone batshit insane. They use blacklists that apparently think half the free world are spammers and as a result, I wasn't getting a lot of my mail. They were basically sending the e-mails into the bit bucket and sending a notice back to the people who e-mailed me. Sadly, since most people are illiterate when it comes to error messages, they saw something that looked like an "undeliverable e-mail" error and took it as such, without realizing that what the text of the message clearly said was actually "we think you're a dirty, filthy spammer, so you can just take your e-mail and toss off."

So I took Cringely's advice and went with Gmail. Not really his advice, but just his findings. Gmail is, for better or for worse, the most reliable e-mail service around, according to Cringely's testing. The web interface was pretty sweet. Accessing it through my MDA phone is quick as slick hell.

I lasted on it for two days.

The reason? Simple. Conversations.

The good thing Gmail does is group your e-mails together into Conversations. So if I send you an e-mail with the subject line of "Sup?" And you respond and then I respond, there's a very good chance the subject lines are then "Re: Sup?" So Gmail says, ah, you are conversing, let me put that in one long chain for you.

The bad thing Gmail does is group your e-mails together into Conversations without any thought process behind it whatsoever. I send off e-mails to publicists with the subject line of "Coverage." Any e-mail I get back or send with that subject line is now considered to be part of the same Conversation, regardless of who I sent it to or when I sent it. It will pull things out of my Archive and tag it with the Conversation.

Here's the kicker: once tagged as a Conversation, it can't be undone. Ever.

So rather than have a long ongoing Conversation that shouldn't be, I've plugged Gmail into Outlook and to hell with it.

Now, here's the fun part of techie bastards. If I were to take this to a support forum as a complaint/suggestion, I would get a lot of responses probably, and they would boil down to two basic types:

1) Limitation of the service. Maybe some day it will get fixed, maybe it won't. But that's the way the cookie crumbles right now.

B) Why would you want to send a bunch of e-mails to different people with the same subject line? I don't have that problem, but that's because I guess I can be unique in my subject lines.

The 1) people are reasonable. The B) people infuriate the shit out of me. Because they don't seem to understand what the world needs.

The world needs functionality. The world does not need us to conform to someone's idea of functionality.

Like with Windows XP. If it installs an update, it will constantly remind you to reboot. If you Google around, you will find lots of people who just say, Eh, go with it. Reboot. What's the big deal?

Well, the big deal, fuckers, is that I'm in the middle of something and I can't reboot right now. I'm not one of these dumbshits who will never reboot their machine–I don't need a reboot nanny. In fact, fuck it: I just don't feel like doing it right now. Why should I have to?

The point of technology is to add value, not to make us change our ways to conform to somebody else's idea of how something should work. The real winners in providing these services will let you roll your own thing however you want to do it. Which is probably why Wordpress works so well. If you can't do it out of the box, there's somebody who can tell you how (or a plugin).

What the hell was my point?

Oh yeah. My e-mail's working. That's it, I guess.