Amazing Systems

Tonight I was without internet access for several hours because I moved my PC to another room and the amazing system of Ethernet in my house doesn't provide a line to this room. (If you were curious, the amazing system I was referring to consists of two holes in the floor and a 50 foot cat-5 line running through them. Really, its intense.) So, since my USB Wireless Antenna is on it's 10^th loan to someone, I'm trucking through about six hours until I manage to rig two 14 foot cat-5 lines together (with the wireless router as a connector) and get back to my beloved internet.

In the mean time, however, I've undertaken 100 or so projects that I needed to take care of, the least of which isn't the thing that started all of this in the first place, moving a shit load of furniture. Then, I cleaned out my hard drive. Let me tell you what it looks like to clean up 467 gigs of storage. (Again, if you were curious – scary.) The main point of posting this – truthfully – is that I wanted to tell you about the worlds longest format ever.

I've formatted a lot of things in my life – from floppies to actual hard drives and never in my entire life have I ever had to wait so long for a format. I have been formatting for a half hour. No, I'm not kidding. I've been driven to sitting here, watching what is possibly the worst show ever on television (and I'm including the Simple Life in that ranking) while trying to format my cursed iPod. See, the day before Christmas, my iPod died. I was, of course, prepared for this with a three year Best Buy warranty for when this thing broke so that was OK. A month with the Geek Squad and they sent it back to me with a new hard drive and in the same condition.

I was not, all together, displeased.

So, here I sit, still waiting, while this thing formats during the reinstall so I can kill some more time by filling it with music. And this, my friends, brings me to my second rant.

Progress Bars That Lie

Progress bars normally lie to a certain degree. They tell you that you are 98% finished and they are not. There is, however, one form of progress bar that is more vile, even than the one that stalls when you think you’re almost there. The kind of progress bar that has no relevance to actual progress. Sure, it tells you that it's actually working on it by continuing to loop around and around and around but what ever happened to the concept of a progress bar telling you how far a task had progressed rather than just that it had progressed. I seem to remember that being the original concept. In fact, if I recall correctly, other cute little gif animations are used to tell you something is working – like the papers flying into the recycle bin when you delete a file or the way the windows flag blows in the wind when your internet browser is downloading or uploading a file. Never – ever – have I seen the IE progress bar loop and loop and loop infinitely, and then I remembered what the problem was. I am no longer in the logical, relevant world of the PC – I have entered the land of the mac and nothing makes any sense.

(If you're still curious – yes, it’s still formatting.)

As much as I love graphic design and as much as I realize that Mac makes some of the best design platforms out there – or did, until the 64 bit chip – I could never make the iSwitch. Don’t think I haven't given them a fair shake! As a kid, I went to a small private school – and there is nothing that a small private school liked better in 1992 than an Apple. I haven't tried OSX and I don't ever plan to because, let's face it, it's really just a matter of which OS sucks less and Windows has my vote all the way.

For now, I'm going to go back to eating my cashew chicken and staring, mesmerized, at my useless progress bar to wait for the Rapture.