Kick 'Em While They're Down

From MarketWatch:

A group of Detroit businesses are encouraging the more than 2,000 recently laid off Yahoo employees to consider bringing their talents to the Motor City.

These people just got fired, and you want them to go to Detroit? Haven't they suffered enough?

Mid-Season Blahs

I've been recording several of the midseason shows on my DVR - Alcatraz, The River, Terra Nova. But I didn't watch more than one or two of any of the shows - they just failed to grab me in any real way like some other serialized shows such as Lost or 24.

And now that the shows have come to a close, it appears I haven't missed much. Terra Nova - already cancelled. The River - not likely to be renewed. Alcatraz - apparently not making much of an impact.

Were there any new shows this year worth keeping up with? Is it really this hard to make even one good television show?

It's kind of sad that the newest show I've been interested in is Storage Wars.

Strike One For Apple

Finally, an Apple product or service that I am not happy with.

Just signed up for iTunes Match, the service that stores all of your songs "in the cloud" (or really, "in the iCloud"). I haven't had any problems with the other iCloud services, but so far, iTunes Match is just a big fail on my new iPhone 4S.

Ever since I turned it on my iPhone, the Music player just seems to be buggier than I've ever seen it. When I have a playlist on shuffle (my usual mode), I will usually get two or three songs into the list before it just stops playing. The little play triangle is present, but the timer doesn't move forward and no song is playing. Skipping forward and backwards shows different songs, but still no sound.

Then I'll get tracks that don't show the artwork. But if I go back to the Songs pane and restart the track explicitly, the artwork will be there.

And sometimes a song will be playing, but the wrong song will be displayed! If I move forward a track, the display will skip two tracks, with the extra track in the middle being the one that had been playing.

I'd like to use this service - it's cool to get an urge to hear something and be able to get it from my Mac at home right away. And for what it's worth, the Mac and Windows iTunes clients seem to be working correctly. But until the iPhone client is cleaned up, this is going to be a no-go for me. A big disappointment.

Updated: Well, I turned off iTunes Match on my iPhone and went back to the explicit syncing - and I am still getting the hanging on shuffle mode! I'll have to see if the other symptoms are present also, but maybe this is just a base iOS error of some kind. I definitely don't recall seeing a lot of mentions of this bug around the Mac blogs, though.

It's Like Asking For A Strip Search

I wouldn't go through airport security with one of these USB drives: