Stupid iTunes 8.0

Look at this thing. LOOK AT THIS THING.

First, the boring, "List View" - that I never had to use before - with Windows Task Manager open for resource-viewing purposes:

Here's a closeup of the memory usage (click to enlarge, for best results - Stupid narrow blog layout):

A little over 72 megabytes of RAM being used. Kinda large, but nothing out of the ordinary, in today's world of giant-ass computers.

Now, here's the thing. "Cover Flow" view, which is the easiest way to get around, and the way I always did things before, is basically broken in the new version. Here's what I've been able to use my powers of deductive reasoning to figure out: The way it works now, every album cover you scroll past goes into your computer's memory and stays there as long as iTunes is open. Even if it's long since scrolled off the screen. And these are big files, too. Sure, they only show up as little pictures at the top of the screen, but clicking on the "Now Playing" thumbnail that comes up usually reveals them to be massive, taking up a good chunk of the screen. And if you've downloaded legally purchased as much music as I have and put it all on your computer, that's a ton of album cover images. A "fucking shit-ton," as some scholars would say. And there are a lot of people out there whose stuff absolutely dwarfs my own. I know this because they're the people I ended up downloading stuff from comparing online music collections with. Anyway, a shit-ton of giant images uses up a shit-ton of memory. How much? Take a look:


Wait, what?


You are not reading that wrong. One billion, three-hundred forty-two million, eight hundred and forty thousand bytes of memory being used by one program. OVER ONE POINT THREE GIGS OF RAM IS BEING USED, PEOPLE. JESUS. Hell, the last computer I had before this one couldn't even be upgraded to hold that much, and it's not like iTunes is some intense, professionals-only program, so it's not out of the question for computers of that scope to be trying to run this monstrosity. And note that I had only scrolled up to the letter S by this point, meaning that it might even hit 2 gigs if I went all the way to the letter Z. So it's no more visible album covers in the navigation for me until they fix that crap.

It's just too bad that Windows Media Player and WinAmp both blow dicks, or I'd switch back to one of those.

Dell Dimension Trials and Tribulations

With major system upgrades comes major problems, like how moving up to XP in 2002 left me without a scanner or a cheap, shitty digital camera. So far, here have been the issues I've had to deal with: (WARNING: If you're normal enough a human to not know stuff about computers, this is all going to be a bunch of nonsense)

• Had to download new drivers for my printer. No big deal at all, except for the fact that HP's download servers are slow enough to take an hour to send me a file that would take less than twenty seconds to get from anywhere else.
  
• Onboard graphics have no DVI connection, meaning I have to hook up the monitor with a VGA cord. Only available VGA cord is horrible and unshielded, meaning everything is all ghosted, like cable TV that's being stolen from a neighbor or something. I could have sworn I had a better cord somewhere, but apparently not.
• Old graphics card, (ATI Radeon 9250, for the record) despite not being as good chipset-wise as the onboard GeForce 6, has more video RAM and a DVI connection, so it would be something cool to use until I find a real VGA cord. The problem? Despite being fully able to run DirectX 9, it's still somehow totally incompatible with Windows Vista. Basically, it would work, but the Windows Aero theme wouldn't be available. And Windows Aero is basically the main difference between Vista and XP. D'oh.
• Hey, the new computer uses SATA connection type stuff to hook up disk drives, instead of IDE, which works a lot better. The problem? My old (as in maybe six months old) DVD-RW drive is IDE, meaning it's useless to me now. Not too big a problem, since this computer came with one, but I lose LightScribe functionality that the other drive has. (That's the thing where you can flip the disk over to the label side and basically burn a picture on there) So, uhh, anyone who wants a DVD-RW drive that can do LightScribe and about 15 or so LightScribe CDR disks can make me and offer or something.
• PS2 connections are old as hell and outmoded by USB 2.0, which is the new hotness, at least as long as FireWire never really catches on. So this computer got rid of the standard PS2 mouse and keyboard connections in the back, making USB the only option. No big deal, seeing as how my mouse was USB and a new USB keyboard came with this thing. Oh, except they didn't think to add more USB slots when they got rid of the other stuff, meaning I effectively go from six available slots to four. And between a mouse, a keyboard, a video game controller, a printer, an external hard drive, the external DVD burner I use to capture videos with, and assorted other cameras, MP3 players, and bullshit like that, I have something like ten things that need a USB slot to connect to the computer, and of those things, six are pretty much never disconnected. So I had to steal back the old USB hub thingy I bought to put in my old, ancient computer that only had USB 1.0 and then gave to my brother, whose computer had similar problems. So that problem's solved, giving me a total of ten slots, not including the bizarre, useless one that's housed inside the computer. But now, I only have one remaining PCI slot (old school PCI, not PCI Express) for internal-type expansion.
• I've only ever used Windows Media Player for audio and video files, and I've never had any complaints with it. But with the new and improved Windows Media Player 11, (exclusive to Vista, oooooh) videos slow down for the first few seconds, and MP3s start cutting out toward the end of the song. Also, if you've got a playlist and want to skip to the next track, it takes like ten seconds to do so, when it happened instantly before. So ITunes is looking really good right now, and I usualy hate Apple stuff. (Seriously, fuck Quicktime.)

Yeah, Technology's Gay.

Ahhhhhhh

Well, I'm in close to 800 bucks of debt right now, which means eating tuna and noodles for a month or two in the hopes of paying this thing off before interest kicks in, but I've got a PC that works now, and there is hella-computing going on right now. It's not the one I really wanted, (which was way better and would have been about $100 less, but I couldn't get that one because I didn't want to wait another month of saving up money, because Dell seems to be the only place willing to give credit to people who actually pay stuff off quickly...) but it's still a huge upgrade. I go from a fairly robust 3.0 GHz Pentium 4 to a freaking sweet dual core AMD processor running at the equivalent of about 4.4, and the available memory has quadrupled from 512MB to 2 gigs. Nice. There are some problems though, like the graphics card. It's a GeForce 6 series, which is way better chipset-wise than what I had, (the $65 Wal Mart card) but it has half the video RAM (64) of what I used to have, and there's no DVI input, so I have to run to Best Buy to try and find a VGA cord for my good monitor, so I can stop using this blurry, eight year old one. Also, contrary to my fears, Windows Vista seems fairly sweet so far. I like having stuff like headlines, notepads, and local weather on my desktop without having to be slowed down by massive spyware to do so. And it looks all pretty and stuff. Aww. But yeah, this monitor is killing my eyes, so I better head out before the place closes. Later, jerks.

Soon.

New computer has been ordered. I am in debt again and old computer is now my brother's problem. Updates to come... Soon.

DOES NOT COMPUTE

Stupid hard drive. Stupid Microsoft.

Hey, if you think your W4 might possibly be wrong...

...You really should have fixed the stupid thing before it got out of hand.

Just did my taxes, and after a W4 screw-up I had forgotten about, the results really kinda sucked. Basically, I had myself down on the withholding thing as having two deductions (Which is hella totally wrong, and I knew it was hella totally wrong, yet that's you come out with if you actually follow the directions, instead of just being non-stupid and typing in a 1.) so things got all screwed up. I had, however, held out an extra $10 federal per check, (Can't remember why I did that, but it worked out okay, I suppose.) so federally, it wasn't too bad. In the end, even with added capital gains taxes ($ HIGH-ROLLA $) from them selling my grandmother's house, I owed the feds twelve bucks. Eh, not too bad. State, though? Well, as soon as I hear back from the place I E-filed with to confirm that everything got filed right, I owe the state of Oklahoma three-hundred and six dollars. God dammity damn. The sad part of all this being that I KNEW I had screwed that form up like ninety years ago and never got around to changing it. Oh well. I've got the money for it, so everything's cool, and with all this out of the way, I'll know exactly how much freed-up money I have, so I can possibly stop putting off the repair of my "holy crap, it could die at any second, keep it under 60 mph" car. Of course, I've had the money to do that forever now, and I still haven't done that, for some reason.
I think the point I'm trying to make with this blog post is that I'm a gigantic dumbass.

Also, I need a new printer. I came to this conclusion while spending like an hour wrestling with the stupid thing, trying to print out the file copy of my return, before realizing I could just save the PDF file to my computer. I like the scanner part of this Lexmark I have, but the printing part leaves much to be desired. There's some crazy design flaw in these things that makes the ink cartridges get clogged up and dried up, so basically, every few months when I need to print something, I have to buy new cartridges. And no, running the cartridge cleaning program or even taking alcohol-dipped Q-Tips to the damn things doesn't work, either. But yeah, I've now had like four sets of ink cartridges in this thing now, which is sad, considering that this is in a period of about three years and maybe fifty pages printed. For the price of all that ink, I could have just gotten a real printer. I need to go back to an HP. The computer of theirs I had was fairly nightmarish, but the HP printer I had was wonderful. I mean, it was from 1998 or so and printed like two pages an hour, but the thing was reliable as hell. Actually, I'm pretty sure my brother still has it, and it still works, so I oughtta see if he's not using it anymore, and just use it as my printer and the Lexmark as my scanner. Eh, but that would be a reason to not buy new stuff, and no one wants that. I should go check things out tomorrow. Or hell, Target and Wal Mart are 24 hour places, so I might do that tonight. I wonder if I should just keep this as my scanner and just get a cheapo one that only prints, though. It would save money, but it would also take up a lot of space and probably eat up way more computer resources. On that note, I really need to think about buying more RAM someday. Eh, but what can you do.

Anyway, in summary, I'm way stupid, Lexmark makes good scanners and crappy printers, and it's a shame that you can't separate the two once you've bought a printer/scanner.

Also, fuck a government, and the fact that people get all stoked over a refund, acting like it's free money someone's generously decided to give you, when all that means is that the government had taken more than they were supposed to, and that's money you should have had like six months earlier, when you really could have used another fifty bucks for electric bills or whatever. On the other hand, the refund you get back is also money you'll probably need when you're fifty bucks short on the electric bill again six months from now, after you spent it all on a Playstation 3 or some fancy chrome rims or something a day after you got the check, so maybe you get what you deserve on some level.

At least I'm not the only dumbass out there.