NP: John Coltrane, The Heavyweight Champion (CD)

With the release today of The Matrix: Revolutions, it seems either fitting or altogether disturbing that I seem to be losing the battle with the machines today. I started catching up last night on updating my CD database, with the assistance of what has normally been a fine program called Music Collector, but I hadn't touched it in awhile, possibly two different updated releases. So the first problem was figuring out that the batch entry mode had been replaced by a more generic "Add Albums" feature.

That, in and of itself, wasn't that big of a deal. What was weird was that, as I was adding albums to the queue to be looked up online, my mouse more or less disappeared. Actually, my whole system ground to a halt. It was nasty. I thought the mouse was the problem, and changed the batteries (it's a wireless model) to no avail. So I plugged in an old trackball, and still, the response from the system was not good.

After about an hour wrangling with it last night, and a bit more today, I think I found the answer. My first guess was that queueing a large number of CDs in the lookup list was the problem, but ultimately, I've come around to the "Auto-Scan" box as the culprit. This is supposed to make the program automatically list the CD, then eject it so you can load a bunch to look up at once.

Anyway, after a couple of hours of scanning and re-scanning CDs, I finally got the situation mostly under control. If I were feeling diligent and/or really fucking bored (that latter one being a much more likely outcome of late), I can now download cover art for pretty much everything in my collection. That could ultimately translate into something that appears on this site, but don't hold your breath.

Meanwhile, it finally dawned on me that the "enhanced" part of the Foo Fighters CD might be how you get the acoustic version of "Times Like These," but I was repeatedly thwarted as I tried accessing the "bonus content" online. Apparently I'm SOL, with no technical support to contact or anything, so I guess I'm not really entitled to said content by actually buying the CD, which shoots a big hole in the "add value so consumers buy instead of download" argument.

Then, because two anecdotes only barely make a trend, I brought my car to the dealer because they insisted there was a simple switch I needed to throw to get my hatchback to start talking to the rest of the car, as well as the keyless remote, but that seems to be something they added the model year after mine. So now I have to bring it in next week to get looked at.

So, yeah, technology is winning. Outside, I'm wondering if it's normal for all the leaves to fall from all the trees in the space of about 24 hours, but that could have been the rain, or me just not paying attention.