Why do they say sick as a dog? What’s a dog got to do with anything?


Have you ever felt you’ve got bruised intestines? Chances are, if you say yes, you could never have known for sure—not without taking them out and cradling them in your arms, which is hardly possible, practical or, indeed, advisable if you want to live.

So I say now that I think I’ve got bruised intestines—I fell ill remarkably quickly on Wednesday afternoon, spent well over 24 hours in almost continuous screaming agony, and today I’m relatively fine if I lie down, albeit weak, but if I stand up I feel like I’ve done way too many sit-ups: my stomach stiff and sore, my body still exhausted from having been able to snatch little sleep while the severe stabbing pains were at their peak.

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Friday, May 2nd, 2008

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Stopping podcast updates is iTunes most annoying ‘feature’


You can only wonder at the stupidity of whoever decided it was a good idea to have iTunes stop updating podcasts if you haven’t listened to any in a particular series for a week or two. This takes no account of busy lives, and is damned annoying when it comes to a sequential soap like The Archers, episodes of which the BBC only makes available for a limited time. When they’re gone, they’re gone and no amount of pressing the update button brings them to your hard drive.

The function could be useful—but only if you were able to customise it, and even turn it off. But as with so many aspects of technology, we, the great unwashed, can’t be trusted. Why? What are we supposed to do? Subscribe to less podcasts? Stop everything else in our lives to listen to podcasts to make sure iTunes keeps updating them? Stupid, stupid, bloody stupid… I’ve got the software set up to never delete podcasts, preferring to do that myself when I have listened to them—so why would anybody need it to stop updating when they can delete podcasts either automatically or whenever?

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Friday, April 18th, 2008

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