Me vs. the Machines
Jan. 6th, 2005 09:46 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
gwynI am getting ready to don Sarah Connor gear and do battle with Skynet. The machines are taking over, people, and they are frustrating the hell out of me!
1. TiVo decided to not record Alias last night, which I realized halfway through and so I missed everything. It apparently decided it couldn't record it because it started at 9:01 (it did not tell me this beforehand) and CSI: NY is scheduled at 10. It refuses to allow you to set a pass to end a recording early, but will let you start a recording early. You can extend a recording late, but you cannot start a recording late. This makes no sense to me and makes me hate TiVo with a grand passion, putting me back to my old early-TiVo ownership state. Now I have to waste a precious half hour or more setting up manual recordings, which I hate because then you get all kinds of crap if they move things around; or, try to remember to record CSI, a show I loathe but feel compelled to watch because of Gary Sinise. I will not remember it. This is why I bought a ruttin' TiVo in the first place. I could set up my VCR, but, geez... I don't even like CSI. So could some kind soul tell me what happened on Alias? All I saw was Vaughn and Syd talking about the season finale last year, and Arvin and Syd facing off in the new Apple-designed ice-white office. No, I don't care about spoilers -- if someone clicks through to the comments, they can deal.
2. I like the iPod. I do. It saved my mental faculties, what few I have, on my trip to San Diego when my plane was delayed for eons. But everything is apparently located in the online manual, and I haven't had time since I got the thing to read the effing manual. Everything I've done with it has been trial and error, with plenty of the latter happening, while trying to do a million other things. It seems to not do anything the way the little printed booklet said it would. Then it deleted all my playlists when I tried to auto update. Then I read in the printed book that it will automatically delete songs that are not on iTunes on your computer when you plug it in. This disturbs me greatly, since I wanted the iPod so that I could treat it as my repository for all my thousands of CD's best songs. I don't want them all on my computer; I want to collect them and dump them in the iPod and then wipe 'em off the computer because I want all available disc space for vidding. Surely I cannot be the only person who doesn't want all that music on computer (stuff I can easily re-input)? Yet the booklet says it will delete songs from the iPod that are not on the computer and then helpfully intones about what to do if you have more songs on the computer than you can fit on your iPod -- hello! I'm of the opposite problem! What about ME? I know, I know, RTFM, it's just that I haven't had any time. Will leaving it on manually update fix this problem, or will it still delete what's not on iTunes if I plug it in?
3. iPod headphones. Dear God. I put the earbuds that had been recommended by all these lists and comparison shoppers I read on my wishlist from Amazon, and my sister bought them for me for Christmas. When I dumped in some music and put the nifty expensive earphones in, I could not believe what I heard. It was like the worst radio ever. It was like listening to the worst radio ever through a tin can. I thought, OMG! People like these iPods? This sounds horrible. This is the worst sounding thing I've ever heard. OMG, I can't believe my dad spent $300 on this thing! And after fiddling with settings for ages, I finally gave up and put the earbuds in that come with the iPod, figuring maybe it was worth a try even though everyone said they were terrible and awkward and painful and don't sound good. World of difference. There was actually fidelity and midrange and vocals. Real sounds. Suddenly the iPod seemed like a good thing. I'd thought it was the player's fault, not the 'phones, because all the comparisons rated the headphones better than the ones that come with the iPod. So now I have to return them and stupid Amazon makes it such a hassle to return a gift it's unreal, and you end up paying more for all the shipping than you would if you bought full retail in a brick and mortar store. Gyp. I cannot believe that people rate those earphones better than the crummy little awkward ones you get automatically. They must be totally deaf.
4. We're getting ready to transition the magazine to the new ownership. I get to work from home for a while, for more money than I get as a contractor, so I'm thinking it's a good deal. But the transition is so mixed up and fraught it's not funny. We're all completely confused, bewildered, and no one knows how we're going to work. I get a laptop because I groused about not having room for a Windows desktop, but I'm totally flummoxed by the DSL setup. I really don't want to swap the cords back and forth from my Mac to the laptop every day, but the router that someone told me about, sort of a DSL line cable splitter, counfounds me and I haven't figured out how to work this yet. Anyone out there use a setup where they have a router to split their DSL line between computers? I'd love to pick your brain. I'm not even sure how I set up the laptop for the DSL line anyway, but I'll have to figure it out and hope the software they sent me deals with this. Everyone points a finger at everyone else -- no, ask them, no, they'll know, no, we don't help with that... it's such a freaking nightmare even for the people who are already set up, but worse for me with my weird situation and my complete stupidity. In a million years I'd never have expected this situation to arise, so I totally didn't plan for anything like it. But they will pry my Mac out of my cold dead hands; plus, this is really only a temp job even though it's for a while, and I'm not giving up my setup for something that isn't permanent. No way no how I'm going to use Windows machine unless it's for work and I absolutely have to (apparently I have to for this, Virtual PC can't access some of the shared networks).
Not of the machine variety, but time has been unkind to me and I'm only able to work on the next chapter of Measure of a Man in dribs and drabs (insanely busy at work, and the transition, too), and haven't had a chance to do more on Ciudad, either, not that anyone's champing at the bit on that. But I *am* conscious of them. Just... way more stuff to deal with than I have time for right now. Sorry.
1. TiVo decided to not record Alias last night, which I realized halfway through and so I missed everything. It apparently decided it couldn't record it because it started at 9:01 (it did not tell me this beforehand) and CSI: NY is scheduled at 10. It refuses to allow you to set a pass to end a recording early, but will let you start a recording early. You can extend a recording late, but you cannot start a recording late. This makes no sense to me and makes me hate TiVo with a grand passion, putting me back to my old early-TiVo ownership state. Now I have to waste a precious half hour or more setting up manual recordings, which I hate because then you get all kinds of crap if they move things around; or, try to remember to record CSI, a show I loathe but feel compelled to watch because of Gary Sinise. I will not remember it. This is why I bought a ruttin' TiVo in the first place. I could set up my VCR, but, geez... I don't even like CSI. So could some kind soul tell me what happened on Alias? All I saw was Vaughn and Syd talking about the season finale last year, and Arvin and Syd facing off in the new Apple-designed ice-white office. No, I don't care about spoilers -- if someone clicks through to the comments, they can deal.
2. I like the iPod. I do. It saved my mental faculties, what few I have, on my trip to San Diego when my plane was delayed for eons. But everything is apparently located in the online manual, and I haven't had time since I got the thing to read the effing manual. Everything I've done with it has been trial and error, with plenty of the latter happening, while trying to do a million other things. It seems to not do anything the way the little printed booklet said it would. Then it deleted all my playlists when I tried to auto update. Then I read in the printed book that it will automatically delete songs that are not on iTunes on your computer when you plug it in. This disturbs me greatly, since I wanted the iPod so that I could treat it as my repository for all my thousands of CD's best songs. I don't want them all on my computer; I want to collect them and dump them in the iPod and then wipe 'em off the computer because I want all available disc space for vidding. Surely I cannot be the only person who doesn't want all that music on computer (stuff I can easily re-input)? Yet the booklet says it will delete songs from the iPod that are not on the computer and then helpfully intones about what to do if you have more songs on the computer than you can fit on your iPod -- hello! I'm of the opposite problem! What about ME? I know, I know, RTFM, it's just that I haven't had any time. Will leaving it on manually update fix this problem, or will it still delete what's not on iTunes if I plug it in?
3. iPod headphones. Dear God. I put the earbuds that had been recommended by all these lists and comparison shoppers I read on my wishlist from Amazon, and my sister bought them for me for Christmas. When I dumped in some music and put the nifty expensive earphones in, I could not believe what I heard. It was like the worst radio ever. It was like listening to the worst radio ever through a tin can. I thought, OMG! People like these iPods? This sounds horrible. This is the worst sounding thing I've ever heard. OMG, I can't believe my dad spent $300 on this thing! And after fiddling with settings for ages, I finally gave up and put the earbuds in that come with the iPod, figuring maybe it was worth a try even though everyone said they were terrible and awkward and painful and don't sound good. World of difference. There was actually fidelity and midrange and vocals. Real sounds. Suddenly the iPod seemed like a good thing. I'd thought it was the player's fault, not the 'phones, because all the comparisons rated the headphones better than the ones that come with the iPod. So now I have to return them and stupid Amazon makes it such a hassle to return a gift it's unreal, and you end up paying more for all the shipping than you would if you bought full retail in a brick and mortar store. Gyp. I cannot believe that people rate those earphones better than the crummy little awkward ones you get automatically. They must be totally deaf.
4. We're getting ready to transition the magazine to the new ownership. I get to work from home for a while, for more money than I get as a contractor, so I'm thinking it's a good deal. But the transition is so mixed up and fraught it's not funny. We're all completely confused, bewildered, and no one knows how we're going to work. I get a laptop because I groused about not having room for a Windows desktop, but I'm totally flummoxed by the DSL setup. I really don't want to swap the cords back and forth from my Mac to the laptop every day, but the router that someone told me about, sort of a DSL line cable splitter, counfounds me and I haven't figured out how to work this yet. Anyone out there use a setup where they have a router to split their DSL line between computers? I'd love to pick your brain. I'm not even sure how I set up the laptop for the DSL line anyway, but I'll have to figure it out and hope the software they sent me deals with this. Everyone points a finger at everyone else -- no, ask them, no, they'll know, no, we don't help with that... it's such a freaking nightmare even for the people who are already set up, but worse for me with my weird situation and my complete stupidity. In a million years I'd never have expected this situation to arise, so I totally didn't plan for anything like it. But they will pry my Mac out of my cold dead hands; plus, this is really only a temp job even though it's for a while, and I'm not giving up my setup for something that isn't permanent. No way no how I'm going to use Windows machine unless it's for work and I absolutely have to (apparently I have to for this, Virtual PC can't access some of the shared networks).
Not of the machine variety, but time has been unkind to me and I'm only able to work on the next chapter of Measure of a Man in dribs and drabs (insanely busy at work, and the transition, too), and haven't had a chance to do more on Ciudad, either, not that anyone's champing at the bit on that. But I *am* conscious of them. Just... way more stuff to deal with than I have time for right now. Sorry.
