Dear iTunes …

You fucking suck the big hairy one.

Well my iMac and I are getting on quite well at the moment. Few teething issues at first, getting it on the wireless network took a wheil and I’m not going to go into but it was initially having a fit with the WEP I was using but it is all tickety boo now. It was running slow but thanks to Dave who advised I choke my flatmate ….. well OK choke back on the upload limit of his bit torrents and now I’m online like I expect to be. Still using FF and Thunderbird, I’ve also installed Open Office for all my M$ Office needs :-D. There is one slight niggle which you may have guessed by the title and first paragraph. iTunes is fucking cack. Look I love the fact with myn ickle remote I can control my DVDs, MP3s, videos, photos et al from bed and iTunes has made listening to tunes in my room uber easy. However that is all! First thing I did when I got a chance was move my MP3s over to the hard drive to the music folder, not a quick task took just over an hour. I then opened iTunes so I could give ’em a spin which was fine till yesterday when I looked around. The stupid POS had copied EVERY SINGLE MP3 from the Music folder into an iTunes one and in a way I didn’t want them, so I had two copies of every MP3 I own on the Mac :-?. OK so I worked my way around that just deleted them all and started again and made sure I deticked a box in iTunes and so far so good *fingers crossed*. Now for the really annoying bit, this actually hurts. I have a way of naming, organising and ripping my MP3s. The filename is Track Number – Track Title – Artist.mp3 e.g. 01 – Through The Fire And Flames – Dragonforce.mp3. I put them in folders like this: Artist/Album Title/name.mp3 and if it is a compilation I do it a little wierd I suppose so it is just Album Title/name.mp3 but In only have one or two of them as I’ve not ripped my OSTs. I also use EAC with the LAME encoder to create Variable Bit Rate MP3s. NOw EAC is NOT compatible with Mac and I aint in the mood for emulation of Windoze here. So I learned there was a script I could use with iTunes that would use the LAME encoder, ugh it was slow. This is actually when I found out about the extra copies of the MP3s while trying to track down the MP3s I was creating to test them. To be honest no problem with slow, EAC ran pretty slow on the PC at home BUT iTunes a) doesn’t appear to create ID3 tags!!!!! b) was naming them track number track title.mp3 e.g. 01 Through The Fire And Flame.mp3 no hyphens, no artist, no option that I have found to change the naming scheme c) was slapping them in that iTunes folder again and I can’t see an option to change that. iTunes is an OK player but it is constantly talking about “the shop”, has a whacked out libray system and creates crap MP3s. I can ignore the “Buy This” nonsense, I have even hopefully taught it to use my library system BUT I still can’t rip MP3s. I have just had to use Rich’s PC to do some, and that is annoying. Can anyone help, I could be just a Mac newbie and can’t see all the options but I want a ripper(only preferably) which will do what EAC did but for the Mac. I’ve installed X11 for OPen Office would this somehow let me fool EAC that I was using Windoze? I will get some photos up of the Mac, its setup and how pretty I look through its iSight camera :-D.

Anyway less whinging Al the git got free money and so now has a DS with my fave game MarioKart DS and what would probably have been my next purchases; Phoenix Wright – Ace Attorney and Animal Crossing – Wide World. I say would because I’ll borrow Phoenix .. when he’s done with it, I’ll definitely buy AC-WW though it looks great craic. I keep meaning to put up my MKDS friend code and plan a thing in my sidebar to list them all (there is a seperate one for every WiFi enabled game) but since I aint implemented that mine is: 545521 976662, leave yours in the comments and we will battle online no snaking though or your dead :-D.

Have had a busy week along with getting the Mac Tuesday, which really didn’t get a real look at till Saturday. Monday was my Burpday, I’m awaiting the 1/4 life crisis with anticipation and fear (i.e. I’m 25 :-?). We all(Sean, Rich, Alex, Shonagh and Matt) went out for Mexican in The Dogstar which now has El Panzon in it which was the Mexican in The Hobgoblin. It’s Uber Tasty and cheap but even more so on Mondays 2 for 1 on some 1/3 off others. After that we got back to the house and they’d actually decked out with balloons, bought cake and sweets and generally made it a PARTAY. It was cool and I give props out to the guys :-).

Tuesday saw the Mac and the hairy one arrive (my brother). He was over till Thursday lunchtime we hung out in the evenings, drinking beer, shopping in HMV and watching football. He spent his days skating and just generally checking out London. He could be a little jealous I’m living here but feck it. He saved me a few sheckles in HMV cause I bought about £140 worth of stuff for £95 including: first two muppet films, two Clone Wars DVDs, Red Dwarf 8, Tool’s Aenima, Hundred Reasons’ Kill Your Own and the latest Kerrap cause the CD this week was Master Of Puppets done in its entirety as covers with songs by MachineHead, Mendeed, Mastodon and Chimaira. I don’t like Metallica but unreleased songs by those four was enough to justify it. There was one last thing I bought the Piece De Resistance, the reason for entering HMV at all …. it was the Gamecube controller designed for use with Resident Evil 4, a game I don’t even like but when the controller looks like this you’ve got to buy it. Also those tracks off the Kerrap CD are actually quite good given thme all a spin (only the four metioned I don’t need to hear Fightstar, FFAF et al)

So T-Bob as he is occasionally kept me occupied Tues and Wed. Thursday was reserved for a quick pint in The Hobgoblin and on to the below reviewed HR gig. At this stage work was mental, I’m off to Warwick tomorrow for the Institue Of Physics conference and I’d to make sure we have all new posters, 2 LCD screens, two types of flyers, juts generally a professional looking stand so I’m bushed and can’t wait till 5 on Fri to get home and sleep the sleep of the dead. It wasn’t exactly how it panned out. I’d left 18 posters in to be printed on Tuesday and dropped in 4 more in Thursday and I thought I’d have them by close of business Friday. Not fecking likely any guesses when I eventually left the printers? Go on just guess it was half 9. Four and a half hours after I was meant to leave, thanks to Des in Reprographics who wasn’t leaving till they were done but I have a feeling his comrade in arms Dips may have been a little in the wrong because Des didn’t see them till Friday and Dips had printed 3 :-?.

I was too exhausted this weekend to do anything, only left the house to got o the Tesco Extra in Croydon and only spent a fiver cause I’m not here most of the week (off to CERN in Switzerland after Warwick) and then (lets see if those people I live with actually read this, I aint told them) it’s Easter weekend 4 days off and since we aint organised anything I’m off to Lions Eat Ice Cream Everyday Sometimes Tigers Eat Rice (Leicester) on Friday to hang out with Mr and Mrs Daniels, some friends of mine. I’ll have to see if there is anything on in The Charlotte or Leicester in general that weekend.

Not only do I have to get to warwick tomorrow I have to get into work first to collect evrything and guess what Brixton station isn’t open at the mo. It closed on Saturday and opens again on the 17th. Makes me glad I’m away for a good chunk of that time to be honest.

I don’t think I have much other news but *looks up* this post is quite long so I’ll kill it now. I’ll keep ya updated from warwick and CERN they look like they’re gonna be fun and really looking forward to it, it’s not everyday work sends you to the West Midlands and then onto the Swiss/French border.

Link Of The Day:
Boot Camp Apple actually encouraging Windoze on their machines? Interesting if they’d released earlier they could have scoped a prize for running M$ on the new Intel Mac’s like mine. I aint interested to be honest I’m surronded by Windows machines and happy to have switched.

Later Days,
Halo.