iLove/iHate

Love my iPod...

I really don't know what I'd do without my iPod. If I didn't have it I'd have to carry around a CD player and a stack of CDs a foot high, and even then I wouldn't be able to play podcasts while I'm in the car, say.

The sad news is that it looks like my iPod is dying, like Jennifer Jason Leigh's squishy game pod in eXistenZ.

I had a few problems with it when Apple released version 1.1 (I think) of the internal iPod software without testing it properly, but the 1.2.1 release seemed to fix most of the problems.

The recent problems have been much worse. The poor darling's screen keeps popping up a message saying that Firewire isn't supported, and it sometimes takes five or six hits on the centre button to get that to clear; occasionally I've had to reset it. Then last night something pretty bad happened; I updated podcasts as I do most days, and this morning I picked it up so that I'd have something to listen to in the car while I drove into town for milk - and the battery was flat.

I've got too much music and stuff on the pod to risk losing it all. Most of the music is held in iTunes - stuff I've bought from the iTunes Store, and stuff I've imported from CDs - but there are a fair number of home-made movies, MP3s and WAVs of older music, and a load of podcasts that I keep for reference, that aren't in iTunes. So I bought a thing called MediaWidget that lets you do a full backup of everything, took a backup, reset the iPod to factory settings and restored from the backup. So far so good. I'm hoping that's going to fix the Firewire warnings, and I really hope the battery doesn't go flat on me again, but we'll see.

...hate Apple

Apple's support stinks. Let me put that another way: Apple's support really stinks. You pay $300 for an iPod but when you have problems the only real support option is to go onto their support forums and post a message. I have never had a single response from Apple answering any question I've posted on the forums. If you want to call, it looks like you have to pay $35. I can't think of any other item I own for which the manufacturer's support is so shitty.

Welcome to the 19th Century

What the hell is wrong with State government?

All I want to do is get our car registered in Colorado. You'd think something like that would be fairly straightforward, right? Wrong! Because of a local bureaucracy that's still working with twentieth-century technology and nineteenth-century attitudes, it's taken me two days and it still isn't done.

To register I need (1) proof of insurance, (2) confirmation of the VIN, and (3) the old state registration or title from Texas (and of course (4), a f*cking great pile of cash).

Proof of insurance - well that one at least was easy.

VIN confirmation - now, the car was parked ten feet from the building entrance and the VIN is stamped on it in at least three places, of which two are extremely easy to get to. Can someone walk outside and write the number down? No. Can they take a photo? No, instead I have to take the car to a dealership and have them fill out and sign a paper. (How do they know I didn't fill out the damn thing myself? I have no bloody clue.) It's a good thing I'm not driving a Tatra - I'd probably have to go to Czechoslovakia to find a dealership.

Title document? Well, the bank has that. So I called the bank to have them send a copy - and they can't do it because they're in the middle of a merger and the title document hasn't been scanned into the system yet. Yes, scanned. The title document is paper - not a paper record of a database entry. Computerization of records means scanning the paper in as an image. Christ know what happens if the building housing the paper records catches fire.

Okay, what about the registration? I called our old local tax office down in Texas and asked what I need to do to get a copy of the registration real quick. VTR-275 form, they said, and $2.30 fee. Fine. I wanted it real quick so I sent the form and the fee express overnight ($16 and some cents), and asked them to fax the copy. The form went out yesterday; I got the fax this afternoon. So far so good. But when I got to the county clerks office, they wouldn't accept it because it was a fax. They have to have the original.

Message to local government: This is the twenty-first century.

We have digital cameras. We have databases. We have high-speed Internet communications with unbreakable security and digital signatures for verification.

So What the F*CK are you playing at?! Why are you still using paper copies? Why isn't a fax good enough? Why the hell couldn't I just have asked the tax office to send the registration document in a digitally-signed email to the clerk's office here? Better still, why couldn't the clerks office just look up my registration online?

This, folks, is why our local taxes are so goddamn high. I've been running around for two days chasing this stuff and the job is still not done because of local government procedures that were set in stone in the Pleistocene Era. Isn't it about time we fixed that?