Wayne D's Blog

I don't know what's going on with this cold, It's been two weeks since I caught it and it's still hanging on. This will be a shorter entry than I really wanted to make because I just don't have the energy to write.

I've decided to join the 21st century and buy an iPod. I downloaded  iTunes a while ago while on the quest for the perfect music player. All in all it's still my favorite, what I really like is the party shuffle feature. I can tell iTunes to make a selection from my music library and then fiddle with it a bit after ITunes has made it's selections. I wish it supported a few more file formats but you can't win them all. I also have the Rogers branded Yahoo music player installed on my machine so I can listen to the streaming music that Yahoo provides as part of the package I have with Rogers. I stopped using it for a while because every time I tried to start it up it would try to go out on the Internet and then hang. That went on for a month or two. I also have the Dell branded MusicMatch Jukebox player that came with the system. It's also OK but it's constantly whining at me to upgrade which I find profoundly irritating. The one thing I really like about it is the watch folder feature which let you set folders for the player to monitor for new tracks. When it finds them it automatically adds them to your music library. Hey Apple how about adding that feature to iTunes. 

My emusic subscription means that I don't buy much other music except the occasional song from ITunes. Now that I've decided to buy an IPod it looks like iTunes will continue to be my music source for files with digital rights management. It's sad that these guys can't get their act together so that these files are interoperable across player hardware and on Linux. Maybe the Linux on iPod project will become the Rosetta Stone of DRM.

What finally made me decide to buy an iPod? Podcasts. My friend Steve told me that he had stopped listening to radio and spent most of his time in the car listening to podcasts. I subscribed to the Daily Giz Wiz podcast. I now listen to it most nights in bed before I go to sleep. I've also subscribed to a couple of CBC podcasts including The Best of Outfront and C'est la vie's Word of the Week. In anticipation of getting my iPod I spent some time on the iTunes Store today looking for other podcasts and have subscribed to a few more. We are heading off to Ottawa next weekend for a wedding and I expect I'll load some video on the iPod for the kids to watch in the back seat. It's a long drive and  sometimes it's hard to find something listenable on the radio.

Complaining about Goggle being tardy about indexing my site in my last posting worked! A day after I complained they updated their index. I'm surprised at such responsiveness from the behemouth of the Internet. Lest you think I have taken leave of my senses please realize I know that what happened is purely coincidental. Google had actually indexed my site two days before I posted my complaint. I just wish now they'd spider a bit deeper and index my java games. The one search engine I'm really unhappy with is MSN. Search for www.wdawe.com and you find nothing. The strange thing is that if you search for Wayne D's blog my article on the Six String Nation guitar comes up in the first position just like it does on Google. For some reason the search engines really like that article.

One thing Yahoo should do is look at making Yahoo 360 more search engine friendly. The long complex URL's they create make it impossible for a search engine to differentiate my Yahoo 360 blog from the other Wayne D's who have blogs on Yahoo. What this means is that if you have a friend on Yahoo 360 and you want to find his or her blog don't bother trying to use a search engine to find it.

If you are reading this article on www.wdawe.com and want to comment you need to go to the Yahoo 360 version. One of these days when I get energetic I may move my blog to www.wdawe.com but right now I don't have the energy.