One of the many generous gifts I received this year is a new iPod -- one of the video types. That means it's time to clean up the iTunes music library and get things in order. The iPod is an indispensable tool for me. On the way to work I tend to listen to audiobooks and podcasts. While the good folks over at Audible have more than a few good books, there are others that I'm not able to get from them. The biggest problem with the songs that don't come from Audible is that they don't have bookmarks and when I rip them from CD into the iPod there are many many files. This is where a great applescript comes in handy. With this script it is easy to join together the AAC files and make them protected or "bookmarkable" files.

Who knows with all the music files cleaned up I might just have to move on to all the data on my hard drive... Or make a resolution to do it next year.

Having waited a few months longer than the required 90-days for keeping a domain with a new registrar it is time to be done with RegisterFly. If you've read this site for a while you may recall problems I've had with Register Fly. On the other hand Go Daddy has been a pretty good service. They lack a couple of features, like DNS wildcards, but are pretty good otherwise and I can live with the limitations.

Of course no Register Fly transaction would be complete without hang-ups. They don't want to provide the authorization code necessary for moving .org and .info domains. At no point have they said "no" but they don't respond at all. The picture in this post shows the lack of response from the supposed 24/7 live chat support. To top everything off of course there is one domain where the authorization email won't go through. And of course it is a domain I use and have owned for more than a decade. I'll be quite happy to be rid of the terrible eNom reseller. All of this does make one wonder that an ICANN accredited registrar is willing to continue to allow a reseller to besmirch their name.

The computer is consipring to make sure I don't work too much on Christmas. The two-year-old 15" PowerBook has decided to stop working... mostly. Of course it works just often enough to convince me that it might be salvagable. In the end it seems to be a problem with the display though. We're also taking advantage of the slow time before the new year to make some infrastructure changes. If all goes well the changes will be little noticed. If not the site will possibly be down for a time. Either way email may be a bit slower than expected and instant messenger will be abandoned until next year.