Aaron Adams’s Blowhard Blog

From MacRumors today…

After licensing SoundJam, which was developed into iTunes, Wired reports that Apple started looking into gadget opportunities, but found that digital cameras and camcorders were pretty well designed and sold well in the marketplace.

And I suppose cell phones are neither well designed nor do they sell well. Apple must create a cell ph0n3 n000w OMGWTF!!11!!!

Again, an Apple-created cell phone doesn’t fit Apple’s business model and doesn’t make much sense.

This entry on the Microsoft Mac Mojo blog corrects the false rumor that the upcoming universal version of Office for Mac is behind schedule. It is very much on schedule, according to Microsoft, and I think it’s great that this rumor was smacked down by the most authoritative source possible. The internet echo chamber that repeats and amplifies stupidity has to be stopped in some way, and the targets of such stupidity do themselves and everyone else a favor by immediately and clearly presenting the facts. Good job Microsoft.

I was listening to the radio on the way into work this morning, and the announcer for the station says, “Good luck getting up-to-date weather from an iPod or a blog…” Obviously whoever wrote this promo has no idea what a blog is, and probably doesn’t care. “iPod” and “blog” are just buzzwords to them, not specific terms that refer to specific things. A blog is not the same as a web page or web site. Weather.com is not a blog, although there may be a blog on the site. Purposefully or ignorantly misusing “blog” insults my intelligence and strips the word of its former specific meaning.

Add “blog” to the list of words that have been diluted to the point of no longer being useful.

This morning I was attempting to download an audiobook from the store to listen to on the drive for my vacation tomorrow and iTunes 7.0.1 gave me the following error when the download started:

stopped (err = -50)

As usual, simply typing the error message into the (mostly useless) Apple Knowledgebase returned jack squat. (I should be able to enter any error message I receive, verbatim, from any Apple product into the KB search field and be directed to a KB document that directly addresses the meaning and known resolutions of that error message, if any. I’m not asking for anything for anything unreasonable here. But that’s a rant for another post.)

So I couldn’t download this audiobook, or even find out what the cryptic error message meant. But… I did fix it! And of course, I’m sharing that fix with you.

Go to the ~/Music/iTunes/iTunes Music/Downloads folder and delete everything in it. Restart iTunes and try your download again. It should work, and I’d bet this hint will cover other iTunes downloading errors.

Hubble Discovers Dark Spot on Uranus

I don’t read Slashdot anymore (I’m still wondering how someone there will blame this on George Bush, they always do) but this was too good to pass up.