The Codecruncher

‘Cause I sure don’t.

For the larger part of this past week I’ve been in posession of a 60 Gbs iPod. A friend of mine, living in the country, asked me to pick it up for his girlfriend, as a gift. Besides, he asked me to load some music into it, so the gift was more complete. And, of course, I couldn’t say no: everything for a friend.

Of course I tried changing his mind, to no avail. There are better alternatives. And after having an iPod (yes, I also gave it a test drive) for the last week I’m certain of it: it’s a very beautiful gadget, but you won’t ever see me with one. For starters iTunes, that mutant media library-music player-music buyer won’t be able to touch none of my systems with its poisonous claws while I draw breath.

You have to admit the sucker is beautiful. Very beautiful.

But we’re not talking here about a picture or a statue: it should be beautiful, it has to be functional. And functionally speaking, iPod’s a disaster: a not very loud maximum volume, a pathetic audio quality, not to mention the pitiable speakers, and the wheel thingie (I refuse to call that an interface) is confusing at best, iTunes obsession to clasify your music using its arcane criteria so every song you put into it is going to be missed, and don’t get me started on the battery problem, and so on.

There has to be an alternative.

And there are: at Anything but iPod they’re actively searching for them. Among all their findings, I really like this:

Avaliable at 1, 2 and 4 Gbs; it also plays photos, short videos and FM radio. It has a line-in cable to connect the device directly to a music source and save MP3 without the need of a computer, it has a joystick instead of the wheel thingie, and it’s amazingly beautiful and small.

I have my alternative, what about you?

The less I use Microsoft products, the more I miss them. Books, tutorials, manuals, a complicated in itself third-party software tool which smells worse than its namesake animal and which is, of course, awfully expensive; all of this to try to manage that arcane, meaningless, cryptic and obscure piece of bloatware that from now on I’ll refer to exclusively as Obstacle. I’ve never seen a software less usable and more unfriendly: everything with it is complicated, or slow, or difficult to do. Failing that, you don’t have permissions to do it. It gives, really, the impression that Obstacle is so badly designed purposefully, so that a legion of arcane priests, also known as consultants, can perpetuate themselves and their inmoral high fares just by adoring this hellspawn.

Everything I’ve learned to do in SQL Server has been done with my mouse’s right button. Simple, elegant, intuitive and usable.

And no, sorry, but I’m not admitting that Obstacle is faster, or more powerful. It’s irrelevant to the argument at hand: I could have a very powerful and very fast Ferrari, but what’s the use if it has a potato for a driving wheel?

For all this ¹: