thoughts from an empty head

My life tends to fall into predictable patterns lately. When I lived with Mom and Pop, I was Tech Son, the kid who knew how to do anything and everything with a computer. Now that I live with Josh and Olga, I am Tech Bro, the brother who knows how to do anything and everything with a computer.

But being technically competent with more common computer tech has been more and more difficult lately to be of any help to anyone in my family. Case in point: Microsoft Vista. I know sweet FA about Vista, and I have little interest in finding out anything about it, seeing as each successive release of Windows pretty much looks like the engineers at Microsoft take the functions I’ve grown used to and move them somewhere else. So I end up spending my thankfully-brief Vista face-time equally divided between muttering “where the hell did they put [fill-in-the-app]” and muttering “why the hell did they put that THERE?!?”

Up until last night, I felt comfortable in the knowledge that, although Windows may seem to be a jumbled mess at times, at least Apple had the good sense not to jerk around with its users. Clean interface, nice setup, easy to use, right?

Meet iTunes.

Olga has an iPod, filled to the brim with music from an old computer that she has long gotten rid of. She wants to add her music library to the new laptop that she and Josh have. Problem is, she can’t, because every time she hooks her iPod up to the laptop, iTunes wants to erase all her music and rewrite her new library to the device.

Put very simply, this is a very stupid way to run a railroad. And yes, I know the arguments about piracy, but come on.

I don’t have this problem. I use Ubuntu on the Old Beast, and I specifically buy media players or use music programs that do not demand that I suffer the indignities that iTunes users seem to suffer. Every time I plug an mp3 player into my computer, the OS helpfully links to it and asks what program, if any, I want to use with it, and it treats each device as a new hard drive.

Nevertheless, I did my best to assist my sister-in-law. After much jumping through hoops (including handing off the task of watching me struggle with iTunes to my brother while she nursed the baby), the majority of which was completely unnecessary IMHO, I finally succeeded in transferring her files onto the laptop and adding them to her iTunes library.

But the sheer scope of the problem that this “clean, easy to use” product made by making me jump through arcane hoops just to copy files she already owned was beyond ridiculous. How the hell is anyone supposed to take this device seriously when one has to follow MacGyver-like instructions just to do something that should be as easy as “copy –> paste”?

Something to think about, as I wonder when Rockbox will make a release for the Cowon D2.