Missives from the 6th Floor

1. RSS-Hell

Dawnise decided she wanted to start using Thunderbird as an RSS reader. So I showed her how to setup an "RSS Account" and I helped her subscribe to a couple feeds.

Now she wants to subscribe on her own. She browses using Firefox (another Mozilla application, btw) and I walked her through setting up the "Feeds" preference to subscribe using Thunderbird.

So she finds a site with a feed she cares about, and clicks the subscribe icon in the URL bar.

Nothing happens.

She clicks again.

Nothing.

So I poke at it a bit, and the best workflow I can figure out - the easiest way to accomplish what should be a one-click task, is to set Firefox back to "show me a preview of the feed," click subscribe, copy the URL, go to Thunderbird, right click on the RSS account, choose subscribe, click add, and paste the URL.

Talk about craptacular.

And should she want to use Thunderbird to view an RSS feed with a "friends only" post at Livejournal, she has to deal with this crap.

I mean, really.

2. It's here, it's right Here (with Apologies to Eddie Izzard)

Since he's switched to using his iPhone as a media player, Vince loaned Dawnise his Creative Zen Vision.

Now, Dawnise uses Rhapsody, the Zen is an MTP device (a protocol I've bitched about a couple times before) and Rhapsody speaks MTP, should be easy, right?

So I import our music library into Rhapsody for her - which is apparently a huge mistake. We've got on the order of ten-thousand tracks - it now takes Rhapsody a good minute to startup and respond to the UI on her 3.2Ghz machine.

Next, I show her how to transfer playlists to the Zen - easy peasy - drag and drop. Only all her play lists include tracks from Rhapsody, even when we own the same track. So that means syncing a couple playlists will take over night. Awesome.

(It occurs to me that the music guide/discovery interface could pretty easily favor tracks in your local library, either by naively matching artist/album/track/(duration), or by using MusicBrainz data, but that's a different story.)

Then, I import some new music into our library - which is on network-shared disk - and I try to figure out how to tell Rhapsody to scan for changes. No "Rescan Library Folders" option presents itself, so I tell it to perform the import again.

Another mistake - now each local track is in the library twice - 'cause apparently whatever database Rhapsody uses is not only slow, it doesn't have any uniqueness constraints on it either.

So, I look for a "reset my library," option, fail to find one, and decide to do it the hard way - I switch to the library view, select-all - wait a good 60 seconds for the UI to update - and hit delete. And wait.

And wait.

Deleting twenty thousand items takes for-freaking-ever.

After a bit more investigation I find - in one of the tabs of the preferences dialog - a spot to specify "watched folders." Great, just what I was looking for. Would be nice to have a checkbox during the import Wizard asking if you want to "watch this folder for changes," but whatever.

So I add our music folder to the watch list, and the folder we just created for her to put podcasts in.

And then we download a podcast.

And go looking for it in the Rhapsody library.

All this time, Rhapsody has been "downloading tracks" and generally sucking up CPU like a Hoover - we're not sure why it's downloading tracks, or what tracks it's downloading, as she's not setup to download copies of the songs in her library. It's pretty opaque, and there's no way to cancel it.

And her podcast isn't appearing.

So we wait a little longer.

Nope, still nothing.

So I get a brain-wave. An icon for the Zen appeared in the "My Computer" display - surely we can drag-and-drop the file onto it and the right thing will happen.

Yea, pull the other one.

So we go back to waiting... Finally we get frustrated and restart Rhapsody. Ah ha! The podcast appears in her Rhapsody library and she can drag it to the Zen.

Lather, rinse, repeat.

That bit about no way to request a re-scan (that won't add duplicates) is especially awesome.

To put icing on the cake, while I've been typing this in a fit of "chuck the fucking PC out the window and buy her a Mac," she's gotten into a fight with Word's auto-correction, which is (incorrectly) assuming that what she's typing isn't what she intends to type, and that it knows what she means - which in this case means hyperlinking things she doesn't want hyperlinked.

I write software.

I understand how complex it can be.

But times like these make me wonder if the people who work on these applications ever freaking use them.

As for the idea of buying her a Mac - it's pretty impractical, mostly for the same reasons I won't be buying one. Like me, she uses dual monitors, and she enjoys playing the occasional game, including Portal, satisfying both of which would require an unreasonably large investment in Apple hardware. But if I could buy OS X and let her run it, I surely would consider it...