SimplifyMedia

This is pretty nifty: SimplifyMedia

It is a plugin for iTunes that allows you to share your iTunes library by streaming your tunes to friends who also have SimplifyMedia. It's like instant messenger for iTunes in that each person makes a username and then you can add up to 5 computers under your name for sharing. You can have up to 30 friends.

SimplifyMedia is a cinch to use. I installed it at work and at home so I can stream music from my home computer to listen to at work - especially handy if I forget my iPod. I also had Trey install it on her laptop up in Fairbanks and that worked, too.

Pros
• Easy to install/set up/use
• As long as SimplifyMedia & iTunes are open and running, you can share your library with other SM friends or with yourself
• Perfect for showing friends songs without having to up/download anything
• The songs stream at the bit rate they exist in its library - they aren't down-sampled
• Private friend list so ONLY your allowed friends and you can access your tunes
• Songs can only be listened to, not stolen or manipulated or re-arranged in any way
• it's for Mac and PC and works seamlessly between the two
• it's FREE

Cons
• it IS streaming, like net radio, so the faster your connection, the less re-buffering you have to suffer
• it doesn't show playlists within the selected library
• Songs can ONLY be listned to, not copied
• it's still in beta so there's the possibility of glitches

Trey is on a bad connection plus wireless so it was a bit more difficult to listen to her library - it kept having to rebuffer all the time. So I wouldn't use this to sit and listen to her library just to be listening - I'd use SM to browse for new music from her. :) In contrast, my connection at work is really fast and my home computer connection is slow DSL but I didn't encounter any rebuffering except perhaps at the start of a new song. Otherwise it was just like listening to my native iTunes library. Very nice. :)

* Location:home
* Music:"Manakin" - Delain

Picassa

I am getting tired of Photobucket's clunky interface. While I was working on putting art onto my Blogspot blog I realised I don't really have a clean collection of ALL my art in one spot. When I first started dabbling online I tried creating collections of my stuff on Geocities, but that place is crap. Photobucket is okay but clunky. I looked at Flickr but it's owned by Yahoo and Yahoo is pretty anti-Macintosh so I don't like using any of their products. Picassa, on the other hand, is owned by Google, which is Mac-friendly. And it integrates well with other Google applications so I'm going to begin collecting all my art into albums on Picassa and relinking stuff to there.

Also turns out you can download something that integrates iPhoto with Picassa online - since the Google Picassa application doesn't exist in Mac format yet.

So far I like Picassa. It's not as clean or high-end looking as Flickr but it does the job just the same and it integrates better with Blogger.com, since Blogger.com is owned by Google. Another fun element is the ability to mark your images on integrated Google Maps. Handy if you want to give folks an idea of where you were at when you took a certain photo.

Linking directly to images is clunkier than Photobucket, though. Gotta figure a way around that...

Microsoft Word

Have I ever mentioned this? How much I detest Micro$oft Word? My dislike is not based on who makes the program, either. It's based soley on poor interface and poor document handling, etc. I seriously have no idea how the masses put up with Word — well, no, I take that back. The masses who all blindly suffer daily from using Microsoft software are obviously used to torturing themselves - no, they actually LIKE it.

Word is so cumbersome to navigate and get anything built properly. There was a time when I knew how to use Word but that was several years ago. I do recall knowing how to use it well enough to create fancy little newsletters for a class project in highschool. I can compare what I felt learning Word with what I felt learning, say, QuarkXPress – industry standard software for page layout. XPress (often called "Quark", though that's like calling Photoshop "Adobe") is to Word what graphing calculators are to simple, basic calculators, at least in terms of what the two programs can do and are used for.

But Learning Quark was WAY easier. Hmm. Shouldn't that say something? Shouldn't learning to ride a tricycle be more simple than learning to drive an 18-wheeler? Apparently this isn't how things go in the software world.

Anyway, my gripe with Word is that everyone USES this vile software to transport text around the globe. And it SUCKS. It REFUSES to give up its vile formatting when imported into a more dependable and versatile program. It drives me NUTS when I get text from a client that I have to lay out in Quark and I must first "de-Word" it, much like picking the ticks out of a newly adopted dog from the pound (or one would imagine). I go through the little song and dance of resaving the file as plain text so that when I put the text into Quark, I don't have to go through weeding out the bizarre residual glyphs from Word formatting. GAH! Sure the process takes only a minute to re-save but when working at a fast pace, minutes count. And the longer the document and the heavier the formatting, the longer the weeding.

Every flipping book, magazine, newspaper, and most newsletters you read were designed in something like Quark or InDesign. Not Microsoft fucking WORD. And yet Word refuses to be functionally helpful to those who are *actually* IN the business of dealing with WORDS. Does anyone else see the irony here?

Seriously, if i have to open Word again one more time today I am going to throw something heavy.