Aaron Adams’s Blowhard Blog

I have a problem with product packaging in general. Way too many packages require me to break out the damn toolbox to open, just plain don’t work as intended, or cause me to risk personal injury to open them. Some day I’ll have a new category of this web site with photos and video demonstrating bad packaging.

I’d like to single out a package that annoyed me tonight: two liter bottles. They don’t stand upright for shit and once they’ve fallen over, they never stop rolling. There’s a very obvious solution to this problem that I first realized more than a decade ago when I had my first job in high school bagging groceries:

Make the stupid two liter bottles square, you packaging morons!

I’m calling people names because I find the current bottles so colossally stupid. If there is any kind of bottle that is exactly the kind of bottle that would be the worst possible bottle, the current one is it.

When I say square, I mean square the sides, kind of like a milk jug. A flat-bottomed two liter bottle doesn’t fall over the second you move your shopping cart. A flat-sided bottle doesn’t roll around in the trunk of your car. It more efficiently uses space in the refrigerator. It makes those bottles stackable, and they don’t roll in your refrigerator when you set them on their side because a shelf isn’t tall enough.

C’mon! If I realized this as a teenager, surely to God some a-hole at a giant soft drink company picked up on it decades ago.

Do it!

I’m not a gamer. Sitting in front of a game console for hours at a time is probably one of the most unappealing, pointless things I can think of, and frankly, I find others who whittle away their lives in front of their Contonda (inside joke) equally as unappealing. However, more than a decade ago, I used to play some games, mostly made by a company named Sierra On-Line, and I suspect some of my readers did too. The graphics were great for the time, but the real kicker was the music. As far as I know, Sierra was the first game company to use MIDI soundtracks in their games, which sounded best when played on the Roland MT-32 Sound Module.

Oh how badly I wanted one of those! Five hundred dollars was a little steep for a 14 year-old at the time (and maybe it is now too). I’ve debated buying a used one on eBay for 1/10th that price, but I’m not sure what I’d do with it. Maybe it would be nice to buy it just to say I have one finally. In any case, the MT-32 was, and still is, a great sounding piece of music hardware.

I wasn’t totally devoid of music for my entire adolescence. After getting my first job, I saved up enough to buy the successor to the MT-32, the Roland SCC-1 Sound Canvas. It was an excellent sounding synth, and I still own it to this day, although I don’t have a PC to put it in. It’s packed away in its original box. I spent hours arranging music using some piece of software, the name of which escapes me at the moment. At one point I was actually a semi-decent self-taught piano player, although I can’t do any of it now since I’ve been out of practice so long.

I eventually outgrew what few games had interested me and stopped fooling around with music. And then one day, by chance, I ran across a website that is actually the point of this article: Quest Studios. Through some arrangement I don’t understand because I skimmed the explanation, the creators of this site have permission to distribute MP3, OGG, and MIDI versions of all kinds of soundtracks from Sierra’s old games. MP3s and OGGs are often recorded by either an MT-32 or Roland GS synth, and MIDIs are provided in MT-32 compatible, GM, or GS formats.

I spent several hours completely raping their album collection. Then I spent several more hours converting songs from OGG to AAC (get an iTunes plugin at MacUpdate to do this) and correcting the ID3 tags for each song. And NO, that is not as much of a waste of time as parking your dead ass in front of a game console.

I’ve spent some time since then re-listening to the old soundtracks I still enjoy. Is it great music? I dunno. Sentimental, yes. Fun, maybe.

And as one last step, I downloaded DOSBox and a few of the old games just to see them again. Wow, how far we’ve come.

I’ve written what seem to be a few pedantic ravings about writing correctly. This evening, I found a very good example to reinforce my point. While watching my nightly M*A*S*H re-runs, I saw a commercial for cereal. The female voiceover said the following line, which I’ve written as I assume it’s intended:

“Women who eat breakfast, like the Special K breakfast, weigh less.”

I had to pause and think after I heard that to make sure I comprehended the message. If written (or spoken) incorrectly, the sentence could turn out like this:

“Women who eat breakfast like the Special K breakfast way less.”

These two sentences mean totally different things. It’s important to write correctly to convey the intended meaning.

Those of us who keep up with the Mac web are likely familiar with The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs, Aged 51 1/2. Thanks to this blog, Steve’s deepest, innermost thoughts are revealed to the world, and those of us in the trenches get a taste of what fame and power are like.

Not to be outdone, Steve’s nemesis Billy Gates Tells It Like It Is, Yo. Bill’s just getting started, but judging by the snarkiness of his first few posts, he intends to give it to Steve on the chin.

This oughta make for some good reading until Bill gets tired of the whole thing, or runs out of ideas, whichever comes first.

A few days ago, I bought the audiobook John Adams with the intention of listening to it in my car on the drive to and from Nashville to appear on Your Mac Life the week of WWDC. In total, the book is nine hours and 54 minutes long, and that’s the abridged version. I figure the drive is five hours each way, so along the whole trip, I’ll hear the entire book.

iTunes breaks the book into five parts, all except the last being a little more than two hours in length. This creates a bit of a dilemma for me. My car has a CD player, and I don’t have an audio-in jack for my iPod. Nor have I yet purchased an FM transmitter for my iPod nano. And since each audio file, except one, is longer than what can fit on a CD, I can’t burn five CDs and listen to it that way either.

In my opinion, if a music service is going to split almost ten hours of audio into multiple parts, make those parts CD burnable. I don’t think that’s an unreasonable request.

Until then, I’ll be acquiring an iTrip auto for my audiobook listening pleasure.