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:

DVD Spending Tab II

Second DVD purchase of the year. Yeah, I'm a Jackie Chan sucker, so cheap double-dips are always appreciated.

Jackie Chan Blu-ray 4-pack, $8.65 at Target.

Total for the year: 5 movies, $17.30 spent, $3.46/movie.

Here are my reviews for the movies included:

Project A
Project A Part 2
Operation Condor
Armour of God

Song Of The Day

"The Rain Song" by Led Zeppelin.

Run To The Light

Well, I knew that some were grabbing up the soon-to-be-outlawed 100 watt bulbs, but I didn't know this was happening:



Ten dollars for a four-pack of bulbs. Forget gold investing!

My First Siri Request

Gave my new Siri app a little test right out of the box - let's see if she knows how to do this:

"Remind me to make a doctors appointment late next September."

She almost got it right. This resulted in a reminder to make a doctors appointment, but the late part apparently didn't get handled, as it was set for midnight on September 1st. So a switch over to the reminder (fortunately, the one she created was clickable right from the Siri window, so I didn't have to back out of Siri, swipe over to the Reminders app, and dig back through to find it), and change the date to later in the month.

I was wondering if she would somehow select some date in the back half of the month for late, but I guess not. What about the end of next September? Maybe that would have worked better?