Ever since I got my 60 Gb iPod for Christmas, I’ve been using iTunes as my music player when I’m on my computer (XP Pro, sp1). Overall, I’m very pleased with it, but there’s one thing that has really been frustrating me, and that’s the failure of a “smart” playlist when used with Party Shuffle.

I have lots of music. 12,701 songs, to be precise. With a library that large, it’s easy to forget about entire albums, so I have setup a playlist that I call “Never Played” that is supposed to only return songs that I’ve never listened to through iTunes. The definition of this playlist looks like this

Given that definition, one would expect this “smart” playlist to only return songs with a play count of 0, that do not have a genre of classical or musical (as in Sondheim, Webber, etc). I use this playlist via Party Shuffle like so

How, then, do you explain this? Notice the line that I’ve highlighted with a red box. The final column on the right is the play count column. This should always be empty when using this playlist until after the song plays.

This happens at least once a day, and usually more frequently. If I change Party Shuffle to use a different playlist and then switch it back to “Never Played,” the duplicate will be gone and things will work properly for a while. Then another already-played song will show up in the list. I’ve even noticed a few times that as soon as a song has rolled off the top of the list it will roll back on to the bottom, complete with a 1 in its play count field…

I update to the latest iTunes every time there’s a release, but it still happens. I can’t imagine that I’m doing something wrong, but you never know. Ideas, anyone?

I finally got off my duff last week and signed up for BellSouth Fast Access DSL Xtreme and so far I’m pretty happy with it. Well, it was a rocky start, but now it’s good.

I signed up last Thursday and was told my DSL modem would be here by 02/23, which is this Thursday. This morning I discovered that my existing DSL connection with EarthLink was dead. I tried to bring it back up through my SonicWall router but it wouldn’t come up. Let me qualify that: it wouldn’t come up to a point of usability, but it did get an IP address that was different from the one’s EL would give me. Thus I surmised that BellSouth had gone ahead and switched the line, even though I still didn’t have the modem.

The same thing happened to a friend who made the switch to BellSouth a month or so ago. His modem arrived on the same day, but a few hours after the switch. And that’s what happened to me. Mine arrived around noon. Now, how hard would it be to include a slip of paper in the box that says “Hey, when you get this thing plugged in, give us a call and we’ll make the switch?” I guarantee the switch didn’t take longer than a few minutes, and by doing that, they could save their customers some frustration. I’m no longer frustrated, but I was then.

So how fast is it? Well, with EarthLink I was on a 1.5M/128K plan. Now with BellSouth I’m on their “Xtreme” plan that is supposed to be 3.0M/384K. I tested it twice today using DSL Reports Speed Test and got 2,630K/297K, which ain’t bad. Plus it was cheaper than EL, so that’s a bonus.

Last Thursday was my 15^th anniversary, and in commemoration of that date, I decided to get my lovely wife some flowers and have them delivered. I ended up going with proflowers.com and got the Three Dozen Assorted Petite Roses. I payed for shipping plus an extra charge (about $4) for “guaranteed morning delivery.” The price was good, overall.

The day of delivery came and the morning went and still no flowers. They finally showed up via FedEx around 1:30 PM, which is definitely not morning delivery. So I sent an email to ProFlowers customer support telling them what happened and asking for a refund of the $4 that was supposed to guarantee morning delivery. I got a response back later that day. They didn’t just refund the $4, they refunded the entire shipping charge, which was a decent chunk of the total price. I was happy, and I will definitely use them again in the future. It’s customer service like this that keeps customers coming back.

And by the way, the flowers were beautiful and have lasted the 7 days they said they will, and I believe they will last several more.

I’m sure you’re all just dying to know what annoys me… Here’s my latest list of two things:

1. People who back into parking spaces
2. The awful words “gifting” and “efforting”
   (not to be confused with the sacred words, Ni!, Peng and Ni-Wom!)

The first I encountered again this morning. As I pulled into the parking lot for my company’s weekly meeting, I was behind a rather nice sedan. The guy zipped to the left, apparently heading for one of the 9,000 open spaces on that side. I prepared to slide in behind him — but wait! What are those?!? Backup lights, that’s what. I had to stop my car and wait for this yahoo to back into the bloody parking space. That’s very annoying. Had there not been any spaces on the left, then it would have been obvious what he was doing (i.e. being an annoying twit). But since there were the aforementioned 9,000 empty spaces on that side, it wasn’t obvious. And I don’t suffer idiots lightly or patiently…

The second (and, OK, third…) are these new “words” that are creeping into our language. The use of “gifting” has suddenly gotten heavy, though checking Google shows that it has been around for a while. It’s just a stupid word. I mean, is it really that hard to say giving? The other I’ve only heard once, and I’m not the only one annoyed by this ridiculous word used by some talking head on CNN or some other news station during coverage of Katrina. He used it instead of saying “trying.” Now I ask you, what’s so wrong with “trying?” That’s doubleplusungood, indeed.

There is a word that I know that I know, but I can’t remember it. I’ve been trying to remember it for the last three weeks, with no success. I’ve had a “background process” in my mind that’s been combing through all my memories, but it keeps coming up with bupkus. If anyone knows this word, please email me and let me know.

The word, if I’m remembering rightly, begins with trans-. Googling for “trans-” mostly just brings up articles about “transgender” crap, which is not what I want.

The word I’m looking for describes a literary condition where you ascribe an action to the wrong person in a sentence or paragraph. This happens a lot in books like The Bible where you see sentences like “He looked at him and he died.” The potential confusion in a sentence like that is which “he” in that sentence died? Is it the first “he” who looked at the other, or is it the second “he” who was looked at by the first? The word I’m looking for describes this confusion of pronouns.

If you think you know the word, please let me know.

Did I arrange the stones and rake the sand properly to attain enlightenment? Given these photos of real Zen gardens, I don’t think so.

I saw a commercial for Quiznos yesterday that, as Jerry Clower would say, “flung a cravin’ on me” for their Steakhouse Beef Dip sandwich. It’s a French Dip, that’s toasted and is really good. You should try one.

Well, it’s been a rough week. My old host kept going up and down, and at its worst, was DOA for a full day. Not good. I’ve moved my hosting to one of my own servers, and now it’s just a matter of waiting for DNS records to propagate. So, if you’re seeing this message, then things are ok where you are. If not, you won’t realize it anyway. I should be back to regular blogging within a day or two.

Well, those wastes of oxygen, otherwise known as comment spammers, have been at it again. I’ve been getting hundreds of attempts to post comment spam lately, and I’m sick of it. Fortunately, thanks to my CAPTCHA modifications (the wiggly text at the bottom of the comments pages), none of them have gotten through, but it’s still quite taxing on my CPU. And when that CPU is shared with others, that’s not good. So, since I can’t actually kill any of the toads who try so hard to vandalize my site, I figured I try to outsource the comment system. Someone at church mentioned HaloScan as a comment-system-provider that did blacklisting and such, so I thought I’d give them a try. If nothing else, at least my CPU will get a break… I’m hoping that this will work out. I really like having comments from readers, but it’s getting to be a real PITA dealing with the living sewage who like to post ads for pr0n and drugs on other people’s blogs.

As an example of how bad it’s gotten, last week, when I still had email notification turned on, I received 334 emails alerting me of attempts to post spam in one day. None succeeded, but I still had to wade through all those emails. And just last night I got an email from my friend (on whose box I host my site) that he had to rename the program that runs my blog, because it was hogging the CPU. It’s all because of the worthless dirtbag comment spammers. Have I mentioned that I hate these “people?”