Today is my daughters’ birthday and I am 280 miles away and can do nothing about it. She turns thirteen years old today and it shocks me to think I now have a teenage daughter, but I do and I can’t be there for her today.

I will call her today and talk with her, see if she likes the Calvin and Hobbes collection I got her, but I would have preferred to be there with her to pick out a gift. It is hard to know what to get you teenage daughter, they are all so unique with tastes truly their own. It would have been better to be there with her and have the joy of walking through the mall to find something special, but I can’t be there today.

To be with my daughter, just be with her on this special day would have been all I could ask, but life and the court system are at odds with me and I can not see her. Her mother is a heartless person and will not allow it because of a technicality, and my lawyer who was to help me with this has not lived up to her promises again. What am I to do?

And now, as she is entering a new world, one in which she may need a father to give her some advice and guidance, I am 280 miles away and sometimes a phone call can not help nor convey the expressions of love and clarity I wish to impart.

I know this day should be about her, and I want it to be, but to share with her and make it hers I have to be there to love her. I feel bad about this and there is nothing I can do today, nothing I can do by tomorrow, but maybe soon. Maybe soon I can be with her, as I keep telling her in a strained and helpless feeling refrain.

Maybe soon, but for now I have a teenage daughter.

I have been blogging now for over a year and I have decided that there may be too much of me going around. I currently have blogs on Blogspot, Yahoo 360, MySpace, Adult Friend Finders, and of course here. In addition I am syndicated through every major blog aggregator on the web. I am seeing about 25,000 hits a month on MoM not to mention all the other sites. With all that traffic, I think I do not need to be everywhere. I think I will cut my writing back to MoM and AFF where appropriate.

Why bother with all the others (although I will leave the Yahoo site since it updates automatically via RSS) and waste so much time? I was writing entries and then reformatting them a dozen different ways to fit the other formats. What a waste. I care not anymore, this will be my outlet from now on.

It is already me anyway. The look, the feel, are all from my head. Why not just leave it and let those who really want to look into this sordid life of mine come to me. You got to admit, I do a lot of personal writing, and this would be as personal a forum I can come up with.

So, public excess is still granted to readers of Miasma of Musings, the rest of the world can access me here if they want, I will not be going to them anymore.

OK, I gave in to the popular trend and got an iPod Nano. I got the 2 gig version in black and thought it was so cool when I got it, but you know what, it is a lot of hype.

Now don’t get me wrong, the iPod does for me what I need it to, get me through the days of long driving, but it is the promise of what more it could do that fall short. And that is the problem, the device is fine, but the service and manageability of the device is hell.

What do I mean by this? Well, I had ripped all my CD’s to my computer through Windows Media Player, and that worked out well. Even version 11 of Media Player is not too bad and adds some functionality that I like, but it is not convenient to use with iTunes supplied with the iPod. I even updated iTunes to the latest version (ver 7) and that did not help.

So what is wrong? One, I cannot update the iPod with Media Player. Two, I cannot get Media Player to understand that it has to convert songs from WMA to MP3 to put onto the iPod. Three, I cannot figure out the iPod internal structure and naming conventions to fake updates. Four, songs and albums I buy from iTunes can only be played by iTunes and the iPod and I cannot rip then to a CD (EVEN THOUGH I HAVE BOUGHT THE ALBUM). This lack of cross compatibility is a HUGE flaw in the iPod. Five, iTunes converts my ripped music to AAC and takes up space again. Why am I storing two versions of the same data? Six, the iPod interface with iTunes is not very navigable. I never know what I have on the thing exactly, and podcast management is lousy even though I have set the way I want it. Podcasts sometimes show up as albums, sometimes as podcasts.

You know what I would love to see for device management? I simple two paned window, on the left you available media that is playable on the iPod, and on the right what is actually on the iPod. You can add automation for updating podcasts, but visually see the new entries going to the device and old entries being deleted. Sounds a lot like an FTP program, doesn’t it? It should, I think FTP programs like WSFTP are just about the best interface for managing remote sites, why not work it on an iPod too. Seems reasonable.

Data should be stored logically. I like a directory for the “main artist”, the sub directories for each album, and the songs in each album directory. Want to transfer all the “Traveling Wilburys” to the iPod? Drag and drop the Wilburys directory. Want to drop the “Volume 1” of the Traveling Wilburys, just drop the subdir and the iPod sets up the directory structure. Same would apply with individual songs… how easy is that?

Of course you can have a separate little database that can manage all the ancillary information that goes with the artist, album and track, like cover image, guest artists, genre, etc. But the transfers would be simple and direct, why bother with dragging and dropping and not knowing what is or is not on the device.

What it is is feature’idis. These programs have to make things so seemingly simple that anyone can use them. What happens is that they make it so simple that it becomes hard to comprehend what is happening. What these program designers forget is that the human mind questions what is happening. If the processes are so transparent it becomes confusing. I for one do not like it running a program and hope that everything works right, I like to see that it is working right.

I think, ultimately, this lack of cross-compatibility of iTunes and the iPod will be the undoing for the device and service. If I buy songs, I want to be able to use them any way I want to. I have bought them, I have paid the rights to use the songs. The music is not cheaper because they are of limited use, so why limit my use? If I want to burn a CD with the purchased music, say because I am taking it in my car that is equipped with a CD play and not an iPod interface, I should be able to. Hell, if I want to record it to and 8-track tape, I should be able to do that. I know I cannot resell the music, but then again, I could not do that before legally either, that is called pirating. I just want to play purchased music my way.

Also, let’s face it, the selection of music is limited. Have you tried to download any Beatles? Bet you can’t find the real thing. I was looking for Abby Road the other day… nada. Looked for “The Traveling Wilburys” and Jeff Lynnes’ “Armchair Theatre”, again, no go, nada, zip, zilch, bupkis. How many more albums are NOT available, I am afraid to ask, but I bet most of the offbeat stuff I listen to is not available. I even requested the albums and I am still waiting to hear from anyone at iTunes about the status of the albums at all. Hell I would not mind getting a form letter stating they will not be able to get the rights for the albums, at least I would see a proactive attitude on iTunes part.

I love it, these services claim “Millions” of songs available, but let’s look at that a second. 1,000,000 songs is about 80,000 albums. I bet I could name off from memory about 3,000 albums I want. That is a pretty good percent but they would not match up with even half of what I want. I could not find out how many albums have ever been recorded, but the number must be staggering. When you think of all the genres and languages, you realize that what is available online is just a small fraction of the popular material that has been produced.

Interestingly, some of the least likely stuff IS online. I though that someone like Herb Alpert would have been forgotten, but there he is and ready for download. Other stuff, especially mid eighties stuff is not. I can’t explain it.

So, I will continue to purchase CD when I can find them, this Digital Download trend is not up to snuff yet.

What do you get with shared server resources? Well, if you do not know the other people on your server, generally you get Server Pigs. Server Pigs are people or companies that decide that what they are doing is the only thing that should be on that server. They use all the bandwidth and CPU cycles and no one else can get their sites to run. They crash everyone around them and continue to spew their spam or landing sites up to the web. They are pigs and it takes away from me.

That is what is happening right now on my server. A couple of people are spamming from my IP and slowing the server to a crawl for everyone else. The worst part of this particular abuse is what may spill over to me. You see when an IP starts spamming the IP is blocked and it is likely that all the honest sites on this IP will be blocked too. That means I may not be able to send any email soon.

I talked to the Techs at Blue Host and they confirmed what I had guessed, Server Pigs. They promised that they would throttle their bandwidth slowly and restore the server to a more balanced state, but until then things will be dicey. I hate when this happens, I would just shut the offending pigs down, but there are contracts to uphold, so I guess they have to do it this way.

Ah, the Internet, the wild west of the electronic frontier. Time for a round up, anyone for fresh bacon?

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