Filed Under Computers, Life and living, Podcasts, Technology
I’m a big fan of Ira Glass and his “This American Life” radio series. I subscribe to the podcast and listen to the episodes whenever I get a chance.
A few years ago I was listening to another NPR series, “Wait wait… don’t tell me!” and Ira was a guest on the program. As is often the case on the program, the guest tells a little about himself before launching into the game. In this case, Ira told an excellent story that I think is the perfect embodiment of his style - understated and humorous with the bonus of an excellent twist.
I recently came across a re-telling of this story, which I didn’t think was as good, so I dug around the archives and found the Wait Wait site with a link to the file.
I’ve copied it here so that you could give it a listen
I apoligize in advance if it’s a little slow to load - That’s a function of my webhosting, which is not a super-duper account. If it’s really bad, you can right-click on the link and download the MP3 file.
I figured it was easier for most to have a slow-loading MP3 file than to go the headache of trying to use the Real Audio file linked to on the NPR site. It’s unfortunate that Real Audio (a loser in the space at this point) just doesn’t give their codecs to Apple and Microsoft for inclusion into iTunes and Windows Media Center.
Give this clip a listen. It’s really funny.
Filed Under Computers
One of the trends in software that I’m not that excited about is the contstantly-updating, minor patch-releasing, weekly pop-up rendering annoyances of modern applications.
Among the worst offenders (in my mind) is Adobe’s Acrobat PDF reader for Windows. It seems like it’s always downloading something. Microsoft would be at the top of the list, but it is the operating system, and I recognize the need for windows to keep its security profiles up-to-date.
I prefer the option to check myself for updates and decide myself whether I want to install it. I’ll do it at my own convenience thank you (especially if it requires a restart). And for that, I appreciate the option to do it on my own time. This is how I’ve got Windows set, and any other application that gives me the option.
And so it was, with this attitude, that I finally decided to get around to updating my website photo management software (Gallery). Ahh, such naivety. Did I really think that I could simply backup all the files on my website, and the database, and clear the caches, and deactivate the plugins and modules, and upload the new application files, and install them, and configure the installer, and actually get the site working?!
Needless to say it didn’t go so well. It took me an entire day to get through the whole process of updating the website (oh.. and backing out all of the changes and getting the site back to the state it was in before I started the whole process). Painful indeed. But thankfully it was a rainy, nasty Saturday so what else did I have to do?
So once I had the site back to normal, back to the way it was before I tried to update, what did I do? Oh, of course, I tried again! Ugh. Fool me twice… Thankfully I was a little better prepared the second time (and I made sure my backups were truly backups, not just mocking, incomplete similarities to the original files) and it only took a couple of hours to go through the grating process of upgrading and downgrading the site.
Suddenly, the version of the software I’m using looks just as good as it did the day I first installed it. What new features could I possibly need? I think this version will suit me just fine for at least another year, until the pain of this experience has worn off sufficiently for me to try again.
