Bounded in a Nutshell

What today was supposed to be: Get up, drive to Chicago, hang out with Moebius Stripper and some of her friends, see a play, and generalyl have fun.

What today was: Get up, feel like crap, cancel on MS, and spend the rest of the day fighting off headaches and mild dizziness.

Wouldn't it be great if hypotheticals were actual more often?

Orange guesting at Bitch Ph.D has posted a day's worth of her grateful journal. I'm something of a cynic about such things (which, it could be argued, leads to something of a vicious cycle), but let's try it.

1. My furnace works much better on my first attempt with it than did the A/C at the rental house. It was down into single-digit °C last night and will be again tonight, so that's pretty significant.
2. No classes on Wednesday. While I generally don't end up accomplishing everything that I might wish to, I appreciate the opportunity mid-week to collect thoughts and write math.
3. Speaking of opportunities to think, giving tests in class also qualifies, and it's test week for all of my classes. Being stuck in a room for seventy-five minutes with nothing but a blank pad of paper to amuse oneself is great for brainstorming.
4. Friends, no matter how far away. It sometimes amazes me a little bit that I have so many, and that they're all so great.
5. The dude at the campus coffee-shop, charging me the regular coffee price for my au lait rather than the nearly-double list price. Yeah, it's petty, but when the milk's already been steamed the price difference is a little unreasonable. It's a small attack on pointless irrationality, but every bit helps.

That's all for me; now I get to go and price out make-shift deli buffets. Later.

At this point, I'm willing to say that version 7.1 might be pretty cool. At present, though, I've got some issues. My impressions

• As I mentioned in my horrified first impression, cosmetically iTunes has been re-arranged to more closely resemble the interface for Mail. Since the original iTunes interface was then used as the inspiration in later OS revisions, I'm guessing that 10.5 (I can't be bothered to look up the big-cat codename du jour) will have a lot more apps that look like this, and that will make me slightly sad. More specifically, the navigation strip on the left has been cleaned up a bit to separate major elements (library, playlists, devices, etc.) from each other; this make some sense to me.
• One kind of nice feature is that the "Podcasts" item in the library now has an indicator for how many 'casts haven't been listened to yet. Though it does drive home how very far behind I am on CBC Radio 3 podcasts (warning: sound on linked page).
• The "browse" button has been moved from next to the search box to the bottom of the window; it's been replaced by the "view" button-bar. Your choice of views are: the standard list; the "group by album" with album art thumbnails; and the "cover browser", which is supposed to emulate flipping through a rack of CDs or something, I guess. Seems silly, but for some reason it's one of the big points that they're pushing. The latter two views are much more useful if you set your preferences to group compilations together while browsing.
• Oh, album art: another big innovation is that you can tell iTunes to go searching for album art for tracks in your library that lack it. This isn't as cool as you might think; my main difficulty with it is that it seems to be an all-or-nothing proposition, in that if you ask it to do such a search, it does so for your entire library, rather than just selected songs. (Or, for that matter, just songs that lack it; I'm reasonably sure that a couple of my album-art pix got clobbered because iTunes/Apple couldn't figure out what the album in question was.) Also, there's no facility to tell iTunes that it's barking up the wrong tree, or (in some cases) just plain barking. I'd like it if there were an option to approve of found artwork before having it attached to the library.
• The Music Store now rates its own menu. Seems reasonable.
• "Gapless playback", where you can tell iTunes not to cross-fade between tracks on a live album, is a good idea. A quick test on Nighthawks at the Diner indicates it works pretty well, too.
• The Help pages all have a "did this help? e-mail us!" link at the bottom, which is pretty neat. On the down-side, the "what's new with iTunes" only gives a list of selected new features, rather than all of the major changes. The help pages also seem incomplete.
• I guess the really big news in this edition is the iTunes Movie Store. Movies seem to run for 10 USD; a 100-minute movie takes up 1.2 GB or so, but alas! I don't know what that means in terms of resolution. Instead of previews you get trailers, which is a good idea; the trailer-delivery system seems buggy, at least at a casual glance, and that's not so good.

Overall: while a lot of the changes are fairly unimpressive, it's still iTunes, and it does what it needs to do. And (thanks to the magic of the Cocoa framework, no doubt) programs that interact with iTunes seem blithely unaffected by the changes, which is a plus.

Dude. iTunes version 7 is ugly. I don't know whether they're standardizing with the (ugly) Mail interface, or if this is a hint of horrors to come in the next version of the OS, but I really preferred how it was.

More substantial commentary to follow, after my music library's been updated to conform to the new version.

Dr. Matt's Law: Crossing the border always takes much longer than you anticipate, even if you take Dr. Matt's Law into account.