NP: Los Lobos, The Ride

Have I mentioned lately how much I love technology? Computers, in particular?

There's a reason for that.

I don't know Microsoft acts so surprised when people hate them so vehemently. One of the "features" of Windows XP's service pack release is a helpful little monitor that tells you when your compute is "at risk." It does this by way of an error message. This message says such-and-such program may be out of date, then says to click on the error message balloon to "fix this problem."

The fun part is that there is absolutely no action item in the screen that you get when you click that will actually fix anything. The fact that I know what it's bitching about and how to fix it on my own makes this merely an annoyance, but for somebody who doesn't get under the hood of their computer regularly, this is absolutely the opposite of helpful.

Anyway, it's also the least of my concerns right now. I recently moved all my MP3 files over to a networked hard drive, a unit from Ximeta that plugs directly into my Netgear router (yes, there's an element of Googlebaiting going on here, because finding a solution by bitching on the Internet has been a pretty good strategy for me so far). When I ripped a bunch more of my CDs -- the goal is to get them all in digital form sooner or later -- and tried to add them to my library, my wireless connection got clobbered. This happened in both WinAmp and Windows Media Player. RealPlayer seems to have it's own issues with reading MP3s off a network drive through a wireless connection, in that it gets a little choppy. iTunes seems to work okay so far, but I'm still struggling with what it is everyone finds so great about that program, because it won't seem to let me do anything I want to do.

I may just buckle down and connect it directly to my PC, since I'm the only one connecting to the drive. When I bought it, I didn't have USB 2.0 on my machine, so I opted for Ethernet instead. Now, that doesn't seem as practical, unless anyone has an idea as to how I might remedy the situation. I checked for new firmware for the router, got the latest driver for the NetDisk, and re-installed WinAmp after it started getting flakier and flakier, but none of this seems to have helped. I figured, at the very least, that WinAmp would be network-friendly.

So if you have any experience with these sorts of things, by all means, post a comment or send me an e-mail. If not, thanks for listening to me rant in the unlikely event you've made it this far.