It's official: I f**king hate iTunes

iTunes how I hate thee? Let me count the ways.

1. Completely unintuitive music organization: iTunes does great with music you buy from the iTunes store, but anything you import from any other source usually has all the completely wrong information attached to it, and you have to edit it one by one. It also doesn't smartly connect artists, if there's a feature artist on one track on your album, then the song gets listed not under "Artist A" but under "Artist A featuring Artist B". What are you doing?!?! It's the same artist, list it with the rest of their songs!!!!

2. Randomly forgets your library or your iPod FOR NO F**KING REASON! Seriously, it's happened at least 3 times where I plug in my iPod and iTunes says "Your iPod is corrupted" then you have to reset it and it take an hour to reload all the music. Oh and even better, iTunes recently just forgot my library. I start it up one day and it says "iTunes library folder can't be found". I look in the music folder and it was right there! But iTunes forgot it! Cue another hour spent importing files and rebuilding my library.

3. Any file that wasn't purchased in the sanctioned iTunes store is handled weirdly: Sorry, not all my music was purchased from the store, I did have CDs back in the day, I've exchanged music with my friends, and I've bought music from other websites. But when I import none-iTunes store music, it duplicated the file, it also sometimes wants to convert it to AAC format, which make the file size bigger, and makes the file a slave to iTunes.

3. They secretly want you to not back-up your files. A few duplicates ended up in my library, so I deleted them, I also accidentally deleted a few purchased songs. Is there some kind of warning window saying "Oh, hey, you're about to deleted some purchased music, are you sure you want to continue?". Of course not, it just goes in the trash. So I realized I deleted 3 recently purchased songs, so I go to the store thinking maybe I can re-download the songs. Surely since they store every tiny bit of information about your purchase, and automatically know when the song is authorized on a new computer, they will let you re-download the song on the same computer you purchased and downloaded the song on to begin with, right? RIGHT?! Nope, no dice. Time to find the album on a torrent purchase the song again!

4. When you do back up your files through iTunes, they do a shitty job: I just got a new computer, so I do the ol' transfer of the files, and I backed up all my purchased music onto a DVD. I upload the music, it's working no problem, oh except the occasional song that just randomly stopped 45 seconds in. iTunes wouldn't tell me what was going on, so I installed a new music player which told me the file was corrupted. Oh, I see, iTunes, I use you to back up my music, and you can't even write it to a DVD properly. So what happens when the files corrupted because of something iTunes did? Well, since there's no way to re-download your purchases, you better just hope the file is still in tact somewhere (luckily I also has my iTunes music on an external hard-drive).

5. Rent movies from iTunes? How about no. $3.99 for new release rentals? You can rent 4 movies from Redbox for that, or just double it and have unlimited movies for a month from Netflix. I'm already trying to get away from iTunes for music purchases, no way will I start renting movies from them.

In short, I know it's a free program, but considering it's created by Apple which prides itself on creating attractive, user-friendly hardware and software, iTunes is remarkably frustrating and unintuitive. The fact that there's no way to recover an accidentally deleted or corrupted file is a flaw that competitors are already taking advantage of (see Amazon's new Cloud Player). I was recently suggested Songbird as an iTunes alternative, so hopefully my days of iTunes frustration are coming to a close. Good riddance.

“Jump the Shark” has Jumped the Shark

I was reading a post about Steve Carell leaving The Office, and against my better judgment read some user comments. Of course, several were along the lines of “The Original was better!” (yeah, haven’t heard that 15 BILLION TIMES over the last 6 years) but the other negative comment I kept reading was, “They need to just cancel the show, it jumped the shark years ago.”

Okay, to everyone out there in regards to "Jump the Shark"

Now, I remember when this term kind of came into internet vogue in the early 2000s, and I thought I understood it’s meaning. But Urban Dictionary tells me it’s: “a term to describe a moment when something that was once great has reached a point where it will now decline in quality and popularity.”

I take this to mean “Jump the shark” can refer to anything that’s not quite as good as it once was.

“My car sure jumped the shark after it reached 100,000 miles.”
“Ew, this milk has jumped the shark!”
“Grandma really jumped the shark when she developed osteoporosis.”
“I’m sorry, I have you break up with you, this relationship has jumped the shark.”

Wow, “Jump the shark” has, well, kinda jumped the shark in that people have taken this term that once referred to someone very specific and now just uses it as a quick and easy criticism of any TV show that had an episode or storyline they didn’t care for. The Old “Jump the Shark” website even had a category where people listed shows they felt jumped the shark on Day One. THIS MAKE NO SENSE!

The original meaning (from Wikipedia) was, “a moment…characterized by absurdity, when a show abandons its core premises and begins a decline in quality that is beyond recovery.”

It’s not just when a show gradually becomes stale and repetitive, which is pretty much bound to happen to any show that runs longer than 2-3 seasons, it’s the point where the show does something ridiculous and completely incongruent with the show, and THEN suffers a steady decline marked by gimmicky and desperate attempts to regain audience.

True “jumping the shark” is things like this happening:

• same character: different actor
• introduction of a new kid because the other kids on the show are getting older.
• ridiculously “themed” episode (I’m talking black and white “what would this show be like in the 40’s” episodes)
• character coming back from the dead
• completely outlandish storyline

A TV show can definitely have any of these shark jumping moments, but if it recovers from them, the series as a whole hasn’t really “jumped the shark.”

Now I’ll concede that The Office has had some “shark jumpy” moments (the Dwight/Angela/Andy story line in Season 4 comes to mind) but I also feel the current Season 7 has been their strongest in years.

So unless Michael Scott is killed off and then brought back from the dead, but played by a different actor, I don’t believe The Office has or will truly “jump the shark.”