The first downside is, I just inhaled the magic smoke. I can’t get the taste of dead electronics out of my mouth. Took a drag, noticed it tasted shockingly like … I can’t even describe it, and then the battery appeared to be moving toward reaching critical mass.

I popped off the cartridge – the reek of dead electronics instantly filled the air. Quickly unscrewed the atomizer. Carefully place the battery in a location where it could safely explode if necessary. After it cooled… I’m not able to get it to charge, it seems. So, dead battery is almost certain. Even better – atomizer’s likely dead, too. Which sucks, because my other one isn’t broken in, so I get to taste more ass instead of … not-cigarette for at least two days, now.

In reality, I’m likely down $25. I understand the idea of manufacturing defects, but given my business partner had a battery fall to pieces when he tried to unscrew it from his charger… It’s got to be asked: These things seem fragile. Am I *really* going to be saving much money?

Not to mention: Yes, nicotine and water vapor lack a few thousand chemicals. What’s inhaling the magic smoke from burnt electronics going to do to my lungs?

Kind of starting to wonder if I shouldn’t just buy a cheap metal pot.

Y’see, it’s not the nicotine – there’s patches for that. It’s the breathing stuff in and exhaling it.

Steam, vapor… Whatever.

Problem is, I can’t migrate their docroots. Well, I can grab most of the docroots – but curiously, there’s a number of files which are owned by apache:apache and -rx to anything but, wull, Apache.

The virtual server in question has no root access, no sudo, and no way to configure either through their control panel. Last time I had the misfortune of dealing with GoDaddy’s support… Let’s just say, I don’t have three days for another non-resolution.

What to do? Wull, it is a Drupal site…

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Suck it, Trebek. Suck it long, and suck it hard.

(Please note that your mileage may vary depending on how insane the host you’re trying to rescue a client from is. :p)

And life was good, until iTunes decided that delete meant ‘delete entirely’ and killed my copy of Play.

Since then, I’ve made sure to copy mp3s I wish to transfer to my iPod out of my massive mp3 directory, into a special ‘holding’ area, where iTunes can’t do much damage. Oh, yes – I’m sure there are settings for ‘stop permanently deleting my music’, but my experience with iTunes (and OS X) is that when you tell a piece of Apple software to do something, it takes it as, “Please do this, however you see fit, Mr. Computer Who’s Smarter Than Me”. (Whereas Unix goes, “Do this.” “K.” and Windows is along the lines of, “Do this.” “…Yeah, you’re going to need a $200 license for that.” )

So, it’s years later and I’m adding two albums I just purchased cheaply to my iPod. Both came fully loaded; chock full of ID3 tags and album artwork. One album transferred to my iPod, artwork intact. The other did not. There’s no possible explanation for this, other than the fact that – as I’ve been saying for years, iTunes sucks.

I wish I could somehow use WinAmp (2.95, bitches!) to manage my iPod. But even that wouldn’t solve the nightmare of portable music.

At one point, I lost my original iPod. Figured I dropped it while getting in my car – whatever, it was gone. Someone was going to have a nice Christmas.

Rather, I had a nice Spring – months later, my original iPod was found outside my door, face down, and had been covered in a foot of snow for the better part of three months. It also functioned perfectly after recharging, and still carries a longer battery life than my newer nano.

If that isn’t infuriating enough, my old nano allows me to use the left and right arrows to scroll through coverflow. The new one does not. I’ve tried software updates. I’ve tried adjusting every setting imaginable. It just doesn’t work.

Do you know how annoying it is to attempt to drive and select music when you’re limited to the worst invention in the history of user interfaces? I swear, I’m going to make it my life’s work to seek out the Apple “engineer” who thought up the click-wheel and beat him soundly with a sturgeon.

To hell with trout slaps; this calls for a beatdown with the most sacred and holy, the Sizzling Sturgeon of Stalingrad.

…Anyway, it’s 2010. Where are all the decent mp3 players?

I’ve been awake far too long (haven’t slept since… I don’t know when), and was waiting for a return business call. Decided on a whim that I’m growing ever more tired of IT work. I’d like to get rich quick and GTFO of the industry, to be honest. Then again, wouldn’t we all like to get rich quick and retire before we’re 30? Well, I keep hearing (usually from late night infomercials) that people are making bajillions of dollars on these here Internets. So a quick Google(tm) search later, and I was off on what seemed to be a potential scheme. Mechanical Turk. Promising crazy micropayment jobs such as data verification and transcribing images to text, it sounded like an awesome idea to fund my future pirate ship. I have two eyes, and I type fast, after all.

Okay, so I didn’t sign up actually expecting to get rich, or expecting to generate any money whatsoever. Seriously – get rich quick on the Internet? Only if you buy a domain name that’s suitable for hosting images of cats in compromising positions.

Anyway, Turk’s filled with hilariously bad jobs for the most part – anything worth doing, in terms of sanity, is completely absurd from an income standpoint. Anything that pays well? It’s all ‘sign up for our spam’ crap. Suddenly dawns on me, I could just create a spam-specific e-mail account, route it to /dev/null, and, well – I throw out my junk mail anyway. I’d feel bad for the slaughter of the ten thousand trees that would surely fill my mailbox though; pretty much all the “high” paying jobs want mailing addresses for some reason.

Let me quote something from Amazon, here.

As a Mechanical Turk Worker you:

…If your home is a third world country; if you’re happy to work 23 hours a day, and if you have the skills to understand incomprehensible requests, certainly – I’m sure you can make a living off the Turk.

If you live in a first world country, don’t quit your day job.

(Wonder if I’m going to have to claim that $0.03 on taxes next year.)

The better solution for this problem: Join the National Rifle Association.

My latest stuck disc issue was easily resolved by jamming my NRA membership card (which is of a lesser thickness than a credit card) into the drive, wedging it on top of the disc. Press and hold the eject button while applying some pressure downward on the edge of the disc. Slides right the hell out and doesn’t get retracted.

I mention I freaking love technology, man?

Anyhow, I went to snap a quick picture of the cheezburgrz involved. I figure I need as much pictorial evidence as I can gather as to why I shouldn’t remain in Pennsylvania. I power on my Powershot SX100 IS and… Lens error, please restart camera. Beep beep beep. No power.

Restarting the camera several times, of course, did nothing. Upon returning to my present home away from home, I finished my fries while checking out the camera – noticed the shutters weren’t closing. Springs/whatever were fine; the shutters could be manipulated closed, but simply weren’t closed.

Gah.

The solution is simple though: Immediately after hitting the power button, smack the camera decently hard on its left side. With little luck involved, you’ll soon hear your lens making it’s normal lens-like zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzt sound.

I freaking love technology.

Looking through some of my old (previously organized) pictures – trying to figure out if I have a picture of my living room wall before the paint inexplicably started running (protip: never use flat paint in a house with bad windows and a condensation problem)… Noticed, half the images weren’t tagged. Odd. I’ve been making it a point to tag the images. Indeed, tagging is one of the more awesome features of Vista.

Okay, maybe I just missed a few – I usually do organization at 3 AM when I’m bored to tears and awake solely due to deployments.

I go to retag an image and – nada. Error 0x88982F50: No error description available.

I do some Googling; nothing but some BS about Roxio, which ain’t my problem. I give up on Google, searching for the words ‘tag’ and ‘tagging’ is pointless thanks to everyone and their mother having a blog these days. Well, I open up a tagless file in notepad and – there are my tags. Just sitting there. Odd.

Well, at least they aren’t gone.

On a hunch, I open up a file whose tags are working and the tags are there, albeit in a weird, different format.

The plot thickens.

On another hunch, I open the tagged-but-tagless image in Photoshop and re-save it. And now the tags appear in Windows Explorer again.

Lovely – so basically, I need to run every tagged-but-tagless image on my box through Photoshop. For no explainable reason.

Man, I wish Linux didn’t suck so badly for desktop work. :p

Update: Or maybe I don’t have to run everything through PS. After choosing a small directory, sorting tags by Unspecified, selecting all images, opening with Photoshop, and re-saving… Windows Explorer crashed.

Upon restarting Explorer, all tags are now visible. Even ones that weren’t previously displaying. Gods below, I hate computers.