Our New Rock Kitty

I love user interfaces, and I particularly loved the old Mac OS interface. What we would call “classic” nowadays. It looks old-fashioned now, but it was so much more attractive than Windows back then!

GUIdebook > Screenshots > System 7.0.

Sadly, after a few more years, they were putting out desktops like this, which had that horrible italics text. It was basically impossible to read, and I always hated it.

When I was younger, we listened to albums. I don’t mean this as a “back in my day” kind of rant, so please bear with me. And I myself am as guilty as anyone—too seldom do I myself have the patience to listen through a whole album these days. And still, I do miss it.

I would probably call my youth the “cassette tape era.” We listened to tapes, and we liked it. They were portable and convenient, and everyone had one in their stereo system. They also generally sounded like crap… but hey, so do MP3’s, half the time. It’s compromise we make, and everyone back then knew that records sounded better. I suppose we still do.

This is really the era of iTunes. More than the MP3 format, the software that I use to listen to my music has influenced the way I listen to it. I’ve gotten in the habit of rating the music fairly often, and so I have a bunch of smart playlists that I can pick between. Which, bad habit that it is, I do pretty often at home. More often, I just jump from here to there, playing whatever I’m in the mood for. It’s such a simple action that it changes my behavior completely. I don’t have two albums in my backpack to pick between, I have thousands of albums—my whole collection.

Skipping a song on a tape is not a trivial process. It’s an ancestor of the DVR commercial-skipping process, and it takes just about 1/10th of the time you’re trying to skip. So you don’t “always” skip the two songs you don’t so much like on the album, you are going to listen. It just wasn’t worth the time and effort to skip the track. On my iPhone, skipping a track takes little more effort than the thought itself. I do it all the time.

Too often, really. When I force myself to only listen to complete albums, (often because I’m at home, with records around) I enjoy it. I appreciate the fact that you’re giving the artist an hour of your time, not just five minutes. Sometimes it can be quite rewarding.

So we just got DirecTV installed today. And though we tried to watch for 24 hours straight, here it is, not even midnight, with me in bed. I must be getting old.

I’m almost surprised at how much fun it is. It’s a satellite receiver, which they install on the roof, and then you get a very fancy high definition DVR, which actually picks up two television signals at once, to work its magic. I still can’t get over the fact that it can be recording something behind the scenes, while I’m watching another show. Magic.

The overwhelming number of channels is daunting. And the biggest drawback to the device is definitely its interface. It’s fairly logical, as far as I imagine the typical DVR would go… but having used an AppleTV a lot of late, I have to wonder how much better it could be if Apple had designed it.