Like the title says, every now and again, I have to rant about how annoying iPods (and by extension, Apple) are. This is one of those times.

The picture below represents the folder hierarchy of my 20GB iPod, as displayed in the Ubuntu Disk Analyzer:

Right now, this iPod is nearly full. I filled it with a very normal hodge-podge of songs. Naturally, I like some artists better than others, and so, I have more of their songs. The Beatles and Zeppelin, for example, I have a lot of. A-Ha, and Four Non Blondes, not so much. When this is the case, I'll have a folder filled with lots of songs - a big folder. If you look at the image above though, you'll see that my iPod is organized into 50 equal directories, named r1 to r50.

Now, why would Apple do this? Why would they take perfectly organized songs in neat and tidy folders and then split them into 50 folders with meaningless names? Because that makes it more of a pain in the butt to figure out what music is on the iPod, and in theory makes it harder to share the songs. For the copyright violators, this should slow them down.

For the rest of the world, it's a pain, because rather than browsing our iPod like we would a normal music player, instead we must use iTunes, or, if we use Linux, reverse engineer the thing, which invariably doesn't work that well.

Apple could have made a device that worked normally on all computers, like everybody else did, but instead they have locked us into iTunes, a weird directory structure, and a system designed to be as obscure as possible. Not cool.

Cheney is at work to keep his records from becoming public as part of the National Archives when he goes out of office.

"The vice president alone may determine what constitutes vice presidential records or personal records, how his records will be created, maintained, managed and disposed, and are all actions that are committed to his discretion by law."

I can think of no reason why this would be necessary unless he's the shadiest person ever in office. Oh, right.

As an ex-government worker, I can testify to how ridiculous this is: It's really f***ing ridiculous.

Well, it happened. The bastards stole my identity. They somehow got my credit card number, address, phone number, etc, took them, and put them to use. Grand total losses: $309. Not too bad, considering.

I've called my credit card company, and they promise to reimburse me for my losses. This is when I thank the federal government for making them do this. Thank you feds!

I'm thinking about how this happened, and I have a theory. I am about 95% sure this happened as a result of shopping for car parts online. One of the retailers I went to (lost to me now) decided to share my contact information with a number of "partners" so that a part I was looking for could be found more easily. I ended up getting the part, but I think they might have shared more info than they should have. Arg.

After all of the services that credit cards have tried to sell me over the years to protect me from this kind of thing, I'm happy to say that I'm fine without them. It's really not the end of the world...it's annoying though, yes.

It made some headlines, and is about to make more during superbowl. Amazon has started selling mp3's from all four of the major record labels. It's a pretty cool revelation, so I went ahead and checked it out.

Guess what? Linux users, you are screwed. In order to download albums from Amazon, you must "Get the Amazon mp3 downloader"...which is not available for Linux. Excuse me? Say what? I have downloaded literally hundreds upon hundreds of files from the Internet, and never have I needed a special tool other than Firefox. Why now?

Amazon, if you're going to do something great like this, do it whole hog. Don't make me install junkware. After all, I'm choosing to give you money, right?