It’s the Little Things

I let little things get to me. I know this. It doesn’t help to be self-aware when you’re grumbling over nonsense, making mountains out of molehills and the like because, by definition, you’re so wrapped up in the minutae that you loose track of the big picture.

So here’s my current annoyances, things that shouldn’t bother me, but do. Maybe by putting them out there I can get them off my chest and move on.

1. I found a nifty homepage-type site: Netvibes. I used to use My Yahoo! as my home page but it annoys me because everything is so centered around Yahoo! that it becomes a pain to do anything if you’re only a halfhearted Yahoo! user/subscriber. Of course the one thing Yahoo! has that I use the most, box scores from sports teams I follow, doesn’t have a direct counterpart on Netvibes. “No sweat,” I thought, “I’ll just go grab an RSS feed for sports scores of a few of my favorite teams.” You know what? I can’t find sports score RSS feeds. What gives? It’s not like this is privileged, hard-to-come by information, and yet I can’t even find a for pay feed that gives me what I want. Listen, the whole point of all this is that I don’t want to have to visit 2,643 sites each day just to see the stuff I want to see. I want to visit one site and choose where I go to get more details based on how much time I have and what looks interesting that day. Totally lame.
2. What is with women who wear several fluid ounces of perfume? I get caught behind these Sinus Confrontationalists all the time and when someone like me who has a pretty poor sense of smell is overwhelmed and choking to death in the wash of (usually putrid to begin with) Combat Potpourri or whatever, I just wonder how the rest of society doesn’t resort to forming lynch mobs. And I hate to stereotype, but has anyone else noticed that the most likely offenders of this are overweight women wearing garishly colored outfits like lime green pants suits? Newsflash ladies: It’s not magic thinning juice, so lay off.
3. I read an interesting article today about writing better. Of course then in the comments the author gets into a mild debate with a poster over “alright” versus “all right” and he claims that using “alright” gives the impression that the writer is 10 IQ points stupider than they would appear otherwise. You know what drops a person’s IQ 10 points in my book? When they can’t realize that English changes and no matter how much you wish it weren’t so, “doh” is an acceptable slang term expressing sudden disappointment; “email” no longer needs a hyphen and “alright” is a word meaning “fair, decent, of midling value.” Sorry.
4. Valentine’s Day. I have a Valentine and I hate this non-holiday. I’m going to invent a holiday: It will be in August and it will be called “Paul Hamilton Day.” On this day you are required to visit my website and pay me money to tell your significant other how you feel about them. Make sense? Exactly.
5. Software really needs to step up and start doing what I want to happen and not what I specifically tell it to do. The reason for this is that I am an idiot; I firmly believe my technology should compensate for this fact. As an example, I burned a half dozen CDs over the weekend. I’ve been on a music-acquisition kick lately (ever since my shopping spree last week, in fact) so I had a bunch more stuff to burn. I pulled the album lists from my “Recently Added” Smart Playlist in iTunes and burned away. What I didn’t realize is that iTunes burns the list in the exact order you put it in; since the Recently Added list goes in reverse order (discs are ripped from first track to last so the last track is the most recent addition to the Library), so do the albums I pulled from that list which means all my burned CDs have the track order backward. Why would I want that? Clearly iTunes should have realized what I was trying to do and corrected my error so I don’t have to re-burn seven or eight CDs.
6. I downloaded Gaim 2.0 beta because the previous version had a few quirks I didn’t care for. One thing they didn’t change that I wish they would was the account set up; it’s not a significant thing but I found it incredibly unintuitive to apply a Buddy Icon to my account. I really like the way iChat handles account set-up; it’s very obvious and simple stuff like Buddy Icons is just drag-n-drop. Of course iChat annoys me, too, because it’s AOL/Jabber only. Since I started my new job my Buddy List percentages have changed significantly: I’m now at around 62% AOL users and 28% Yahoo! with the rest being an assorted mix of MSN, Sametime and Jabber. From that perspective having an AOL-only client wouldn’t be the end of the world, but that significant chunk of Yahoo! users is a bit of a problem and, for the record, I loathe running two different chat programs. My other problem with Gaim is that for whatever reason it only lets me log into my Gtalk account about 5% of the time. That may not have anything to do with Gaim, but I can log in with the official Gtalk client and Adium (which I’m pretty sure uses libgaim) didn’t have many problems with it—other than the intermittent connection drops that I’ve always had with Jabber.

Now For Something Entirely Different

I’m taking a break from both convention and surliness while I give a personal shout-out to Dr. and Mrs. Mac, congratulating them on the birth of their new daughter, Grace. Or, as I shall prefer to call her, Mac mini.

I’m so witty, it pains me sometimes.

I’m sure you sympathize.

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