It seems all I ever write anymore is rants about technology gone wrong. This won’t be any exception.

I’ve already ranted about how Facebook logs your search history and when you untag yourself (despite already making it really difficult to do so). This combined with the inability to actually see things you’re tagged in now (recent change?) means I’m once again contemplating deactivating Facebook. I would probably just leave it inactive until I need to contact someone, at which point I would pop on, grab the email address (or I guess send a message?) and deactivate again. Argh blargh why is Facebook so bad?

But the thing that has been bothering me lately is the new version of iTunes, especially since I took my personal laptop (running iTunes 11) for the holidays and was very unhappy with its interface.

Here is iTunes 10.

Along the left side, under “Library”, there are various filters for your library. You can view all of your music, shows, etc. You can also filter down by playlist, or things like recently added or recently played. You can sort the music in the usual way (clicking one of the named headers in the music view). This makes sense.

Here is new iTunes 11.

The sorting of your media type (music, shows, etc) has moved into a drop down, which is reasonable. However, all of the sorting options have moved into the top bar (but you can still sort the old way by selecting “Songs”), where they are somehow treated the same as playlists. These seem like fundamentally different things to me… sorting all files is different from filtering down on files via playlists. Apple, why did you do this? This non-intuitive sorting also means iTunes needs all sorts of special tricks like temporarily showing the playlist list when you start to drag a music file (so you can actually add it to a playlist).
There’s also a bunch of changes that don’t make any sense to me. Previously, shuffle/repeat were specific to a playlist. Now, it seems to be a global state. That means, for example, you can’t just click from a playlist (that was shuffled) back to your full library, since you’ll be shuffling songs in your full library as well. (This was useful when you purchased a new album and wanted to listen to it straight through, but your usual playlists shuffle.)
They have also, for some bizarre reason, decided to treat music in iCloud the same as local music. That is, in your library, you’ll see greyed-out music appear that indicates it’s not downloaded. Which would make some sense except it shows EVERY song in iCloud, even ones you have already downloaded, resulting in many being shown twice. (Yes, you can disable this functionality, but you have to unintuitively go to the “Store” tab in preferences.)

I guess this, in particular, bothers me because Apple is known for being extremely user-friendly. The changes to iTunes don’t seem to make much sense to me.

In any case, this has been 500 words of rant, so I should perhaps talk about nicer things.

I had a Christmas. It was nice. Greg got me a copy of the Wheel of Fortune expansion for Carcassonne. This is awesome since it means we’ll now have super Carcassonne with 15 meeples per person and close to twice the number of tiles (and, most importantly, a larger start tile that starts with 3 separate fields). Woo. He also got me a copy of Thurns and Taxis for my birthday, but let me open it early. Awesome game.

I also received an iTunes gift card that I used to buy some new iPad games. Plague, Inc is very similar to the Pandemic II flash game, and just as difficult. Cytus and Groove Coaster Zero are music games, which I generally like. Surviving High School and Cause of Death are “visual novel” type games, although SHS also has some minigames inside it.
I’ve also been playing Sake Visual’s visual novels since I had lots of free time over the last week. They’re really, really well done (even the free ones). Highly recommended.

Also received an Amazon gift card that I used on their $1.99 albums sale to pick up Red River Blue and Red. I actually haven’t listened to the latter yet, but if it’s anything like the singles she’s put out, I won’t like it. Seriously, why did Taylor Swift veer so sharply into pop? (“I Knew You Were Trouble” is closer to R&B than Country, but it’s definetly pop.)

As for getting home, the Greyhound yesterday was miserable. My bus was scheduled to leave at 12:10. We didn’t leave until after 3 when two buses came and went because they were full (with passengers from Cleveland). Seriously, Greyhound, you know how many tickets you’ve sold. Why is it so hard to get enough buses with enough capacity? The part that really bothers me is that their ticket explicitly states, “Seating is first-come, first-served. In case of insufficient seating capacity, passengers will be placed on succeeding schedules that have available seats.” So they don’t even have to take responsibility if they planned poorly and don’t have enough buses… they just have to push you to the next one (which might not and, in my case, didn’t have enough room).
Never again. I think I’d rather pay to fly home than deal with such a mess again. At least, with airlines, they have to compensate you if they bump you due to capacity (and they have ways to check whether your flight has been cancelled or delayed other than showing up at the airport and waiting).

Yay life. Yay games. Yay music. Boo Greyhound.

Edit: Facebook deactivated again. Good riddance. I really wish people still blogged or used email, because I dislike being unable to contact some people. But Facebook is not worth it.

There was a Pittsburgh marathon a while ago. I failed to post photos from that. Here’s a Chris and bblum.

Continuing meme topics, we have KoL and board games.

With most video games, I tend to go through phases of obsession followed by periods of general disinterest (and, if they have enough social pull, I go back to being obsessed). I went through this with PSO, and I go through this with KoL.
KoL, as a game, is awesome, but extremely repetitive (much like PSO, actually)… once you get reasonably good at the game, you just do the same few things over and over every 5 or 6 days. But a couple things make it worthwhile… first is that the devs are extremely involved in the game and therefore new updates (or world events) happen fairly frequently. These are usually extremely fun and interesting and break up the normal grind of the game. And there are also seasonal challenge paths which change the core of the game (either slightly or drastically, depending on the path). And those are always pretty awesome.
Second, it’s always fun to talk to people about the game. My periods of inactivity in KoL roughly correspond to times when I know people that play. For example, I played a lot in undergrad when most of the housing group played (at least casually). And I play a lot more now since I know a few people that play (and talk to them about new paths and items pretty regularly).
I suppose sometimes the world events bother me though, because I somehow feel obligated to participate or I’ll miss a one-time item. I was burned out of the game back when they released the Haunted Sorority House clan dungeon for Halloween, and somehow forced myself to finish the run I was in and get some dungeons completed. In retrospect, I’m glad I did, because there were a bunch of awesome things that can no longer be obtained, but that probably just reinforces the requirement that I play when I sometimes don’t want to. That’s the downside of having invested so much time (and real-life money in the form of donations) into a game, I suppose.
But in general, I think KoL is pretty awesome. It also limits the number of turns you have per day, which means I don’t have to obsess over it and spend as much time as possible playing.
I think I’m approaching a period of inactivity again in the game, since the new challenge path isn’t too appealing to me and I’m going to be out of the country for a month. But it was still fun.

Board games are one of those things I wasn’t really into before college. The group of friends I lived with liked board games, and they were fun, and I liked being social, so I kind of got into board games. (In high school, I was much more about video games, but those seem to hold little to no appeal to me now.)
I suppose they’re good because they involve a lot of social interaction and are (usually) short (so you can play a lot of different games in one sitting) and there are so many options so you’ll always find something that you like.
With the absence of Tim, I’ve been trying to build up a meager board game collection so I can have people over to play them. It’s unfortunate most of the good ones are so expensive.
I’m not sure that I really have a preferred type of game, or even a favorite one. If you count card games as board games, then I generally am a fan of TCGs (creating and collecting and playing). But as far as actual board games, I’ll play anything from quick pointless games (Pokemon dice game!) to long strategy games (Through the Ages) and enjoy pretty much everything inbetween.