Wherein I Complain About Apple

Since I wrote such a nice post about my APPLE iphone earlier this year, I think it is only fair and balanced to write about how much I HATE itunes 9. 

I’m not very good about updating my itunes.  In the last year I haven’t purchased that much music so it hasn’t been necessary to sync my ipod very often and, hence, I seldom even open my itunes.  For the most part, I only open it when I want to do an upgrade to my iphone.  Which doesn’t happen very often.  And earlier in the year it took so long to upgrade my iphone in the first few days of an upgrade that I vowed I would wait the next time.  There was an upgrade that came out a month or so ago and I don’t think I’ve done it yet.  

Well, it occurred to me that I needed to do that so last week I opened my itunes and discovered that there was an update available.  I hadn’t updated my itunes in a couple of months.  I’m not sure I actually updated to itunes 9 when it came out in September.  I honestly don’t remember.  I thought I did but maybe I didn’t.  So I don’t know where I was in terms of updates before I clicked “yes” for this update but I do know that everything was working fine, including my itunes, my iphone and my 80G ipod.  

I clicked “yes” to the update and that ‘s when the trouble started.  I updated and everything started running really slow.  But I figured the anti-virus software update was probably downloading at the same time.  So all I did was update the itunes; I didn’t try to sync anything.   Then, this past weekend, I decided that I should sync my ipod first because that would go faster than any iphone upgrade that I might still need.   So I plugged it in and … disaster.  

After what seemed like an eternity, itunes finally recognized my ipod and told me that it was corrupted.   I wasn’t sure how it could be corrupted since I’d been listening to it the day before with no problem.  But fine, I thought,  I’ll just restore the original settings.  So I clicked the restore t button and it told me (after a long while) that it couldn’t fix it.  So I looked at the APPLE site and it said to disconnect and try a different port.  Which I did. But that didn’t work.  After an hour of looking through the APPLE site and trying every single solution they recommended I still had an ipod that wouldn’t sync.  

So I started googling and came across multiple Apple support forum discussions about how this problem had been happening since September, no one had yet been able to come up with a fix for it and APPLE seemed uninterested in helping and was denying that their software upgrade had anything to do with the problems.   There had been some limited success when people had reinstalled itunes fresh, so I tried that.  An hour later my ipod still wouldn’t sync, I wasn’t even getting messages that it was corrupted and, worse, it had locked itself in an unusable state and I couldn’t get it unlocked.   It seemed that APPLE had decided to kill my ipod!

I was pretty pissed.

For some reason (probably because I was so disgusted) I left the ipod attached to my laptop when I shut it down overnight.  The next morning I started up my laptop and realized that my ipod had no charge – it had run down in the night.  This was exasperating but in fact turned out to be a stroke of luck I think.  Because when it finally began charging again it unlocked and all my music was still on it. 

I immediately disconnected it and I will never try to sync it again. If I want to listen to new music I’ll sync that music with my iphone. I know that APPLE doesn’t really want to support the classic ipods anymore, but I’m not willing to let APPLE kill my ipod to force me to buy a new one NOW.  I have a ton of music on it and I can just use it in its current state until the battery eventually gives out and won’t hold a charge anymore. (That is what happened with my first ipod.  I’m fine with planned obsolescence; but not with murder.) 

In the meantime, while I was recharging the ipod I started listening to music through itunes on my laptop.  And to my great annoyance it kept getting stuck on songs and stopping and skipping in the middle of other songs.  So I googled and guess what?   This has been a problem with itunes 9 for some time now.  

I still haven’t tried to sync my iphone.  I’m too afraid (although it is still under warranty unlike my ipod).  Maybe I’ll do that NEXT weekend.   When I have more free hours in case there is a problem.

All I can say is that if APPLE doesn’t fix itunes 9, all of their advertising to convince people that they have a better product will be for naught and their reputation might as well be flushed down the toilet.   What a piece of crap.

Last Night in Twisted River by John Irving

The first John Irving novel I tried to read was The World According to Garp.  I got to the point where someone (I don’t remember who) had an eye poked out and I stopped.   I didn’t try another John Irving novel for a long time, not until someone whose reading judgment I trust recommended A Prayer for Owen Meany.   I loved it.  (Someday I’m going to re-read it.)   A few years ago one of my reading groups chose A Widow for One Year as  the selection and I enjoyed it too.  I saw the movie Cider House Rules, but I never read the novel.   And that’s been about it for me as far as John Irving goes.

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Castle’s Heat Wave

The other day in my post about Dollhouse, I talked about the creative marketing that the show was using, including having characters “tweet” updates that fit in with the plot and creating a complete corporate website for the evil Rossum Corporation.

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Tips for Wait Staff

I eat at restaurants a lot. And I eat at a lot of nice restaurants. So I've encountered a lot of wait staff in my life.

I've been to St. Louis' most "venerated" restaurant, Tony's, multiple times and I have to say that, although I sometimes think the food is overpriced, the service has been outstanding each and every time. The wait staff there anticipates every need and yet I seldom notice that the wait staff even exists. Which is exactly as it should be. And I've had outstanding service at many other restaurants - both expensive and inexpensive. I rarely have downright bad service at a nice restaurant but, regularly, I'm amazed at how untrained the wait staff is at restaurants that are not cheap. They don't even know what I consider the basics.

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What’s a Body to Do?

Fox has taken Dollhouse off the air during sweeps month ( a bad sign if you ask me) but the production folks have still been busy.   New character “Senator Daniel Perrin” has been twittering. 

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The Happiest Place on Earth

Highlights of my trip to Walt Disney World:

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And now .... A Disney Moment

Walt Disney voices Mickey Mouse:

My favorite ride at Disney World is the Star Tours ride at Disney's Hollywood Studios.  They just announced that it will be closing next year so they can install Star Tours II.   So I might need to ride the current Star Tours ride a few times this trip.

Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel

I was prepared to dislike Wolf Hall, or at least be bored by it. Just between the two of us, Dorothy Dunnett ruined the 16th century for me. Oh sure, I pick up novels set during that time period, but I often end up putting them down before the end. And even if I finish them my conclusion is always: "That was just not as good as Dunnett".

Wolf Hall won the 2009 Mann Booker prize though so I thought maybe it was worth the risk. But I was doubtful. Does the world, I thought, really need yet another book about England in the 16th century? Does the world really need yet another novel involving Henry and Anne Boleyn? And even if the answer to both of those questions were "yes", I still wondered if the world needed a novel about, of all people, Thomas Cromwell?

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RT @CapricaSeven: Remember. No one is born a good writer. Babies can't write.

Unlike many, I haven't gotten into Twitter that much.  I follow about 40 people and I allow about 12 people that I personally know to follow me.   I regularly forget to even look at my Twitter account for days at a time.  And when I do look at it I realize that I haven't missed much.

Except every once in a while when I catch a recent tweet by Jane Espenson.

It is no secret that Jane Espenson is one of my favorite television writers.   She's working on a new show right now called Caprica Seven (which seems to be some kind of sequel/prequel to Battlestar Galactica) and she tweets under the name CapricaSeven.  A couple of television blogs that I follow re-posted some of her initial tweets a few months ago and I was intrigued because she was, among other things, giving writing tips.  So I began following her. 

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War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy

Towards the end of September I read this post by Matt Yglesias about his experience reading Infinite Jest this summer. His conclusion?

But in a fundamental sense it struck me as very unsatisfying. Not just in terms of the weird ending, but in terms of definitely not feeling like I got more out of reading it than I could have gotten out of reading three books that were one third the length. That in turn is really making me glad that I was made to read Anna Karenina and Moby Dick in high school. I really loved both those giant honking books, but does it really make sense for a busy person in the modern world who maybe doesn’t care to dedicate all that much time to classic novels to read them? Seems like it might make more sense to read some short Tolstoy like “Family Happiness” and “Hadji Murat” and then move on to other things.

Adding new possible ways to entertain ourselves naturally starts to squeeze out the viability of some old ways. And maybe the long novel is among the squeezed. Which seems in some ways regrettable (which I take it is part of the point of Infinite Jest) but at the same time to really be a feature of the world.

There was a time when I might have disputed this. After all, what difference is it if you read three 300 page novels or one 900 page novel - if you enjoy the story, or the characters or the style or something about it? The problem, it seemed to me, was the 900 page novel that you don't enjoy in any discernable way. But mostly I felt sympathy for young Matt because at the moment that I read those paragraphs I was, after enjoying the first 1000 pages of War and Peace, only 200 pages from the end but wallowing and stuck just as surely as the French army was wallowing and stuck in the Russian mud and snow. I was afraid that my ability to read long novels was suffering the same destruction as the French army. And I kept wondering why (why?!) I was insisting on finishing the damn thing.

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Other Things I've Been Reading

Over the last couple of months I've read a few books that I haven't blogged about.  It isn't that I didn't enjoy them; I just didn't have much to say about them. 

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The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters

In Robert Altman's 2001 award winning film Gosford Park, Altman and screenwriter Julian Fellowes open the story with a surprise.  While the credits unfurl, the audience is following the progress of Lady Trentham's car to Gosford Park.  We watch the car arrive at the great house; we watch the family come out to greet Lady Trentham at the door; we watch them welcome her to their home for the weekend.  But we do not follow Lady Trentham in through the front door.  Instead, we watch the butler tell Lady Trentham's new servant, Mary, to follow the car around to the back and we unexpectedly enter the house through the servants' entrance with Mary.  Once through the door we see the underground bowels of the house: the great vaulted kitchen, the gun room, the wash rooms.  We see hordes of servants racing frantically around preparing for the big weekend, doing all the hard work necessary to keep the house running smoothly and efficiently. 

Sarah Waters’ latest novel, The Little Stranger, opens with a scene that reminded me of the beginning of Gosford Park.  The narrator of the story, Dr. Faraday, is recalling the first time he saw Hundreds Hall, an estate in Warwickshire.  It was "the summer after the war", he was ten years old and the owners of Hundreds Hall were hosting Empire Day festivities for the locals.  Although he remembers his hosts, Colonel and Mrs. Ayres and their little six year old daughter Susan, what Dr. Faraday remembers most about that day is the house itself. 

(Spoilers below the fold.)

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Wherein I Admit to Being a Stargate Geek

In the fifth season of Stargate SG-1 there is an episode called "Ascension" in which Air Force Major Samantha Carter is told to take a little time off.  A workaholic, Carter protests that she wouldn't know what to do with herself at home.  But the General in charge of the Stargate facility doesn't relent.  

That evening, at home, Carter's doorbell rings and she answers it to find two of her team members on her doorstep.  One is her immediate superior, Air Force Colonel Jack O'Neill (played by "MacGyver" - Richard Dean Anderson).  The other is Teal'c.

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Re-Reading A Whistling Woman

"And that," said Agatha to the assembled listeners, "is the end of the story."
There was an appalled silence.
Leo said, "The end?"
"The end," said Agatha.

AS Byatt's novel, A Whistling Woman, picks up where her novel Babel Tower left off. Frederica Potter, now in legal possession of her son Leo after a bitter divorce trial, is still renting a garden flat from government bureaucrat and single mother Agatha. As the novel opens Agatha is still (still!) spinning the fantasy tale begun in Babel Tower for Leo and her daughter Saskia . But the audience for her weekly story session has expanded to include the two children from across the street as well as Frederica, Frederica's new lover John Ottokar, John's twin brother and Frederica's brother-in-law.

The opening chapter of A Whistling Woman is the final chapter of Agatha's fantasy tale and the adults are as appalled as the children at the way the story abruptly ends. As Byatt says: All these people were both shocked and affronted by Agatha's brutal exercise of narrative power." But Agatha is adamant that it is the end of the story. "That is where I always meant it to end, " she said.

This is, perhaps, a foreshadowing of the end of A Whistling Woman, the fourth and, apparently, the last in the quartet of "Frederica" novels written by Byatt. And just as Leo complains to Agatha, "That isn't an end. We don't know everything," we the Byatt readers don't know everything at the end of A Whistling Woman. But maybe that's ok because, as Frederica remarks, "What's a real end? ... The end is always the most unreal bit ..."

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