Friday, April 22, 2005

Pet Peeve #1

Probably the nicest thing about using not-Windows is that CDs don't try and launch some piece-of-crap player to play itself. On these other systems, you can just pop it in and it won't try to do anything incredibly obnoxious like occupy your whole desktop so that you can look at soft-focus promotional photos of Sheryl Crow or, less appealingly, Hawksley Workman.

I just popped in "Hail to the Thief" and I had this problem. As I tried to start playing in iTunes, the CD player spun up to speed, then back down, then back up, and then back down, refusing to play. Then it started to play, and then it started to play again... simultaneously, on something called the "Player". Now I can't listen to it in iTunes.

This has got to be the most unwelcome marketing ploy of them all. I really don't want to install Quicktime on my 200MHz Pentium to listen to Weezer's "Maladroit", and I would really like to be able to do OTHER THINGS ON MY COMPUTER WHILE I LISTEN TO Sheryl Crow's "The Globe Sessions". I swear, I have owned that album for about 3 years and I have listened to it a grand total of maybe 5 times, and the only reason is because I can't listen to it without it hijacking my whole workspace (and it won't work in our DVD player either). If anyone ever tries to do such a thing with any CD that I am attached to, I will drag this person outside, yell at them for a while, and then get a few people out with me to deliver the dreaded Rear Admiral.

Speaking of the dreaded Rear Admiral, I've been thinking about it and I'm starting to formulate something that might just be brutal enough to warrant the name. I can't really describe it in text, but some selling points are:

  1. It does not require any props
  2. It requires three people
  3. It ends with saluting the victim

I'd like to try it out on that annoying guy in the SFU curling club who looks like a stuck pig.

Current Music: Radiohead - Hail to the Thief

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

If you're referring to those CDs with built-in players, yes, they drive me crazy too. It's worth noting that I think you can disable AutoPlay in Windows.

-SRK

Dickolas Wang said...

How? So long as it doesn't involve the registry, I'll do it.