Philip Norton

I recently inherited an iPod from my dad and have therefore been forced to install iTunes on my computer. This program sucks a big pile of broken glass up my nose! If it wasn’t for the fact that I like to listen to music and podcasts on the way to work I wouldn’t have bothered. Here are a few of the problems that I have come across.

1) When you rip music to your computer it helps if you can find it again. This is why you would expect your media ripper to create a folder structure of Artist->Album and put all of the songs in there. This just isn’t good enough for iTunes and it had totally ruined my music collection by putting files all over the place. For some reason, if the album has ANY (and I mean ANY!) other person contributing to a song in addition to the artist who has written the song it puts the entire album into a folder called “compilations”.  It doesn’t do this all of the time however and will also create literally hundreds of folders called Artist feat. Another Artist.  What the difference is I can’t figure out, and it has utterly ruined by Cypress Hill collection by creating literally 30 folders.  I wish Apple(spit!) wouldn’t do this.  Why is this even a good idea?  Who in the world would want it this way?  The gauling thing is that there isn’t even a way (that I can find) to stop it doing this.  Why not categorise the music by Artist and then Ablum?  Why bother even looking at the composing meta data?

2) If this wasn’t bad enough, when I try to sort out the terrible state my music collection has got into iTunes will come along and put it back the way it was before.  Not only that.  (Oh no, that would be too simple!)  It also leaves in all of the broken back references to the music which it has just moved.

3) For some odd reason when ripping my vast CD collection using iTunes it not only puts random beeps and jumps in some tracks but will also stop ripping 30 seconds from the end of the CD.  So when you are listening to the last track on the album you are treated to it simply stopping.  This doesn’t happen when I use Windows Media Player, and I can get the same effect when I use different computers so it is clear that this is not just my machine playing about.  Why, oh why would you ever want this to happen?

4) I have been using iTunes for about 3 months to listen to podcasts and it was only LAST WEEK that I found out how to play any track I wanted from a particular podcast. For weeks I have been messing around with settings, pushing buttons, right clicking and generally having a hard time trying to listen to the back catalogue from some of my favourite podcasts.  All utterly futile.  When you have a podcast downloaded you will see a little grey arrow (triangle really) to the left hand side.  I ACCIDENTALLY clicked on this arrow one day and the podcast title expanded and revealed the entirety of the episodes of the podcast I had clicked on.  I was astonished!  This arrow looks more like a decoration than a button!  Why didn’t they just create the NORMAL sort of plus and minus system that everyone else on the entire planet uses?  No.  They have to mess about with the stupid interface and confuse everyone.

5) Lets say you just downloaded a podcast that has 100 episodes, which isn’t all that rare.  Want to listen to episode 53 on the way to work?  Tough!  iTunes will only let you listen to lots of stupid combinations of “Most recent 10 unlistened” or “Least recent 5 unlistened” from any podcasts that you select.  You can select them all to be uploaded, but this tends to fill anyone who doesn’t have a 16GB iPod.  You can create a playlist and use this, but this just breaks the way that an iPod plays podcasts and is totally wothless.

I will stick with Windows Media Player (which is a vastly better program - with a vastly better name!) to listen, rip and watch my media.  I will only use iTunes to sync my iPod and download podcasts.  I am seriously thinking about buying a Creative Zen simply so that I don’t have to use this broken bile of monkey poo.

Finally, there is another thing that really annoy me. Podcasts. This makes it seem like it can only be listened to on an iPod. WRONG! When you subscribe to a podcast you are just downloading a syndication feed that links to some audio or video files. Lots of different software is available to download and manage podcasts, not just the broken rubbish from Apple(spit!). However, the name seems to have stuck with people in the industry, and I can’t think of a better one than blogcasts. Which is kind of different really…

If anyone else has had trouble with iTunes then let me know by commenting on this article.

Tags: Personal by Philip Norton
No Comments »

Today is my 29th birthday and I’m celebrating it by doing house work.

Last night I was out celebrating my grandparents 60th wedding anniversary with the rest of the family.  As usual we went to the Beefeater, where the food is borderline microwave-tastic!  Matthew was as good as gold.

Mandy and Matthew made me a cake.  Here is a picture.

I think it is an exceptional cake!  It is an exact copy of a book which I spent many hours reading and thinking about and is well thumbed.  I suppose that this is my first geek cake.

My dad got me a book called God is Not Great: The Case Against Religion, which I will be reading with relish.  Not literally of course, I mean that I will just be eagerly willing to read the book because I’m sure I loath religion as much as the author (Christopher Hitchens) does.

Tags: Personal by Philip Norton
No Comments »

This blog has been running a bespoke blogging package (written by me) for the past year.  However, I have been so impressed by Wordpress through my work in SEO and web design that I have decided to move.  Blogiph, which was what I called my blog software, had some good features, but it would have taken me years to get to the amount of features and shear blogging power of Wordpress.

I have been planning to move over to Wordpress for about a week now, but as version 2.5 came out over the weekend I made a concerted effort to migrate.

So here it is.  I have carried most of my older posts over, although I didn’t think all of the posts about Blogiph made much sense on the new platform so I have taken them out.  This also means that I will be able to post a lot more than I have been in the past.

Tags: Personal by Philip Norton
No Comments »

I was comming home from work today during a heavy raing storm and I had trouble with a few large puddles (especially around Macclesfield). When I got home it was still raining, but it didn’t look like we would be getting any flooding.

However, I forgot that we have moved into a house at the foot of a hill and so when I heard voices outside about an hour later it was our neighbours talking to a police car about how bad the flooding was going to get. Whilst I was looking past them I noticed that a river had formed and was making it’s way down the road on the opposite side from my car. It was coming down the hill and overspilling from the field over the road. Out of curiosity I went down to the end of the road to have a look at what the main road was like and it was very deep there. A police car was out trying to calm down the chaos as drivers sped along the road and hit this wall of water. My neighbours said it was the worst they had ever seen it, and they have been here for 20 years.

I know I’m going to be worrying about this all night now. I hope I don’t come downstairs to find a pool of water in my living room as my computers will be ruined. The rain seems to have stopped a bit now so I should be alright in getting to work.

UPDATE: 07/12/2007 - 08:23 : I made it to work just fine today. Luckily it didn’t rain all night and there wasn’t much surface water about. I can see there would be a problem if it rained like it did yesterday for a whole week.

Tags: Personal by Philip Norton
No Comments »

Although moving house wasn’t exactly easy, it would have been a lot better if I hadn’t had to deal with BT. To those of you who don’t know BT stands for British Telecom, and they are just about the only people who can get you connected to a phone line in the UK. I say just about as they have begun releasing lines to other companies, much like they have done for Internet Service Providers. In our last house we were with TalkTalk, and I had no complaints at all. Their customer service was good, I didn’t spend much time on hold when trying to call them and above all they where cheap. However, they where unable to connect a phone to my new house as there was a problem with the line and so I had to enlist the help of BT. Not only was there a problem, but I was also informed that they couldn’t do anything about that line anyway as BT had control of it. My heart sank as I new I was in for a battle.

It didn’t start well, but then again I wasn’t expecting much. The first few days of trying to get through to them only made me wonder if I should just have the phone implanted into my head. Hours and hours of listening to on-hold music and people continuously saying "I’ll just put you through to the right department", to which you had to explain the whole story again, before being redirected to yet another department.

At one point, two days before actually moving house, I was actually transferred from a BT operator to some guy in his living room at home. He was watching TV at the time and seemed quite annoyed that another person had been put through to his phone. I obviously wasn’t the first! He said I should tell BT about this, but in order to do this I had to hang up. But after spending another 45 minutes on hold I gave it up for the day.

After the move Mandy decided that she would try but she had to use the phone box in the centre of town. She stood there with Matthew for 40 minutes on hold, and whilst on hold there is a message which says that if you type in your phone number, this can be any number including a mobile they will ring you when you are at the front of the queue, so thinking this might be a good idea she typed in her number.

Some 30 minutes later someone rang back and then they had to transfer her to the correct department, only they lost the connection. She was by now getting slightly annoyed to say the least, so she used the ring back option again, and again someone rang back, and she told them not to put her through unless she was going to speak to somebody straight away, so the person went away and came back to her saying that:

"There is a bit of a queue, why don’t you try later."

"From where" she replied

"Your house phone…" stated the bemused BT fool.

"I don’t have a house phone, that is why I have been on hold for over an hour now in the centre of town"

The BT fool obviously didn’t have any other suggestions, it didn’t occur to them that a person wanting to install a phone line might not actually have one already! In desperation Mandy put the phone down and went to an Internet cafe and tried to get to BT website and do it from there but the internet said that we had to ring them! It’s like the old AOL CD which stated something like:

"If you are having trouble getting onto the Internet please view our online help at www.aol.com."

Mandy had to give up for the day as Matthew was getting hungry, and she wasn’t going to put up with any more silliness from BT.

I have phoned from work a couple of times, but there seemed to be this barrier. I have never paid a connection fee to BT before, but they suddenly seem to have started one. In order to get a phone installed I would have to fork out £125! This is a lot of money when you have just virtually bankrupted yourself trying to pay for a deposit and the first months rent in one go! Every time I got through to an operator I would have a long discussion about the bill, refuse to pay it, get into a heated debate about the cost of services, and then eventually hang up when they refused to allow me to continue any further unless I paid the money.

That weekend we went to visit Mandy’s parents so on the Saturday we rang from there and after finally getting through to somebody only for them to say that although there is a phone port in in the house for the phone line, there isn’t actually a line from the house to the telegraph pole.

The only way we were going to get a phone line was to pay £125 for a brand new line to be installed. So after much discussion with this person in BT we decided that we will have to pay this otherwise we weren’t going to get a line. I then got put through to another department, again, but I then spoke to the most helpful and understanding person I had spoken to in three weeks. This Scottish girl eventually convinced me that I would need to pay this money, and that it was kind-of new, but there would be no way around it. I also managed to tell her the story about how I had been trying to get a phone line for weeks, and about the man in his sitting room, to which she was shocked, so when I hung up the phone I was pleasantly surprised. Although quite poor.

Anyway the final outcome was that we got a date for 2 weeks later for them to come and install the line and I had taken a few days off as I was going to go back down and collect Mandy and Matthew.

When the date finally arrived the BT engineer was there at my house at 9 AM and started work whilst I was finishing off my breakfast. Due to the state of the phone port (it’s an old house) he said he would have to replace the lot. 30 minutes later he was finished with the inside of my house and he then climbed the phone mast outside my house. Five hours later I set of for Aberystwyth and I happened to notice as I got to the end of the road (some 50 meters) that there was not one, but two BT vans sat at the end of the road with both engineers looking into an open manhole cover and scratching their heads.

I still concede that £125 is a lot of money for a phone line, but it looks as though I really got my moneys worth out of BT this time. However, their customer services really are shockingly bad! A guy I know has been paying too much for his broadband for 3 months now, and every time he phones up and tries to get it sorted nothing happens and they charge him too much again.

Tags: Personal by Philip Norton
No Comments »

Candy, the family dog, died yesterday.

She was 12 years old just last week, which is quite old for a Cocker Spaniel, but she has been quite ill on and off for about a year. She has been seriously ill over the last few month with pancreas infections and back problems. On Friday night she had a major fit, after which she was obviously either weak or in pain. So yesterday my parents took the decision to put her to sleep to end her suffering.

I stopped by on Saturday on my way to Aberystwyth to pick up Mandy and she was lying on a blanket in the living room. Normally when someone knocks on the door she does what every dog does and starts barking. This time she didn’t even get up, so I knew she was sick. She did manage to wag her tail though. On Sunday, when I was coming back the other way we all stopped by again and she was no better. Her breathing was quite quick so she was obviously in distress. I think my parents made the best decision. Her quality of life was at an all time low.

We have had her since she was a puppy and I spent many years living at home growing up with her. She was daft as a box of frogs and very intelligent. You spot intelligence in dogs by seeing if they use their paws to grab at stuff that is out of reach. She would try this for a bit before nudging one of us to get it for her.

One thing that Candy would not do (despite much training) was fetch anything. I think I managed to get her to do it once, but I’m sure that was just because she walked my way and happened to have the ball with her. Being almost totally motivated by food (you never saw such enthuthiasm) she would run after whatever you threw just to see if it was edible. When you dropped any food in our house it wouldn’t even hit the floor. Everytime we had chicken she would sit in the kitchen for hours waiting for some little scraps.

Here are some pictures.

Hi!

Did someone drop some food?

zzzzz…

Do you have any food for me?

Give me back my basket!

I’ll miss her. She was more a member of the family than a pet. She was my little mate and the household food vacuum cleaner.

Tags: Personal by Philip Norton
2 Comments »

I have been a bit quiet on this blog recently, but I have a good excuse! Moving home.

We have now finally moved house to a nice little place not far from the centre of the town that we were living in before. Due to the short notice of the move we spent all week trying to get everything moved before our next rent check was due on the 22nd of August. It was tight, but we did it. I had a few scrapes and bruises and Mandy sprained her wrist, but other than that we did pretty well.

The original idea was to rent a van, then it was to borrow a van from a friend of my boss and finish the move of that weekend with a van from my dad’s work. Then I realised that I would have to move everything on my own so I hired a guy with a van that my mum knew through a girl at her work. So me and this guy loaded our stuff into his van and unloaded it at the new house. After 3 hours (he charged £15 an hour) we had finished, so I didn’t need the van from my dad’s work after all. I took Tuesday off to move a bunch of stuff on my own and it rained and rained. After a full day of this I was totally wet through.

The new house is great, although there are a few things to work out, but it’s a nice place to live, with a great view of the British country side.

Since I have moved I also don’t have a phone connection yet, but that is hopefully getting sorted tomorrow. After that it shouldn’t be long before I get an Internet connection again.

Tags: Personal by Philip Norton
No Comments »

Today is my 28^th birthday, and I don’t really feel that old. I have done a lot in the last few years and my life is pretty good at the moment (house worries aside). When I got home from work yesterday Matthew’s first words to me where a bit garbled. I understood what he was trying to tell me when Mandy took him to one side and told him that my cake was a secret. To which he promtly turned around and shouted "daddy spaceship cake!". Matthew had spent most of the day helping Mandy put together the cake, which was brilliant, and it was in the shape of a UFO.

Mandy made a little cake for the people who I work with, which seemed to go down quite well. James (my boss) bought me a 1gig MP3 player, which is cool as I have never had an MP3 playing before. Thanks James!

Mandy and I are going to see Die Hard 4.0 tomorrow night, which is her treat to me. When my parents asked me what I would like the only thing I could think of was more RAM for my computer. The thing is when I originally bought the RAM about 2 years ago it cost me about £200 just for the RAM. The same RAM today cost £50. I think having 2gigs will speed up my computer as sometimes things get a little slow and I have to wait for it to figure out what it is doing from time to time.

Tags: Personal by Philip Norton
No Comments »

I got a phone call today from our estate agents telling us that the landlord was thinking about selling the house and that next Thursday someone was going to come over and valuate the house.

When she told me this I visibly shook on the phone, I just could not believe it! We have only just started to feel like this is our home, Mandy is making friends here and Matthew is even booked into the local school. The estate agents did say that she was only thinking about it and that nothing was certain, and that if she did sell she could help us to look for a different house some where locally, but I wasn’t convinced.

Mandy, after initially bursting into tears, decided that this is a positive thing and that it will give us the opportunity to buy our own house. We have bought a house in the past but we had to sell it because of the neighbours so I’m understandably anxious about that.

The town we live in is quite nice really, and there is only one section that is a bit crummy (as far as we can tell), so we don’t want to move away. I guess I’ll just have to wait until next Thursday!

Tags: Personal by Philip Norton
2 Comments »

Today is just about the wettest day in the UK that I have known. It rained for most of the day, but I was sat in work and there was an enormous thunderstorm with torrential rain and even some hail in there as well.

On the way home it was still raining and there is this section of road just before Congleton that goes down hill past the entrance to a quarry and back up again. However, because of the rain this section of road had a one and a half foot deep puddle, which I had to drive through, and because of the quarry it was the colour of chocolate. I will have to take a different route tomorrow.

The rest of the country isn’t doing to well either, there has been flooding in almost every county and tens of thousands of people have been made homeless.

Tags: Personal by Philip Norton
No Comments »