Please Stand By

With the recent email from Haloscan saying the service will be permanently shut down on the 11th of February, I'm starting the process of converting all of my blogs over to Disqus.

Tonight was the first step in that process. We'll see how the export from Haloscan and import into Disqus goes. I'll be keeping my fingers crossed.

Improving Themselves into Oblivion

I noticed that the annoying Yahoo Beta My Yahoo home page upgrade bar at the top of my old My Yahoo homepage has become more sinister. It is now a countdown clock to when my current and well liked page will be forced to upgrade to the new look and site.

Here's the thing, I've seen the My Yahoo future and, frankly, it sucks ass and I won't use it. I've already migrated my widgets and feeds to my iGoogle home page which isn't being forced to do anything except work for me.

Yahoo is also being courted again by the idiot bastards from Redmond that suck the life and fun out of pretty much everything they touch. Its time to put Yahoo on a liferaft with a token bottle of water and a handful of saltines and push 'er off.

Forcing me to upgrade to the new Yahoo home page is the last straw, this relationship has been strained for months now.

What don't I like about the "improved" home page? The layouts force me to have a big honking and annoying ad in a prime real estate spot well above the fold on the left column. The text is a lot harder to read, they changed fonts, sizes and other stuff to make the text more difficult to look at, read and understand. I'm sure I could eventually figure out how to get the font to look like the old homepage but that's a pain in the ass being arbitrarily just handed to me.

There's no reason to change over to a new page and, in doing so, Yahoo will lose a few more customers that it can ill afford to lose. I'm one of them. There will be two reasons for me to visit any Yahoo pages from here on out, I have an email address I tend to use for throwaway sites that require my email before allowing me entry. Two, I do play Yahoo fantasy sports. Sorry, there is a third reason, Yahoo's coverage of MMA (that's mixed martial arts) is better than any other site I know of. Good columnists, a good mix across the mma spectrum (or did you think the UFC was the only game in town? that'd be the excellent marketing job done by Dana White's boys).

Three things, Yahoo. That's all you've got left for me. And once I integrate Yahoo Mail into my Google homepage, that'll be one less thing.

Bonus!

It was with great relief that I unpacked my repaired laptop yesterday afternoon. Two weeks without its high power computational abilities was about a week and a half too long. But it was back, I was happy and I was also going to get OS 10.5 loaded on it as well (since the hard drive problem before prevented me from upgrading).

Imagine my delight when I got it fired up and noticed that my previously 100 gig hard drive had magically been upgraded to a much more spacious 185 gig post format drive.

The nicest thing about this unexpected upgrade is that I am finally going to be able to wrangle my ridiculous and sprawling music collection. There's been no easy way to roll through my multiple mp3 libraries and get rid of the duplicates, of which there are many.

So I'm importing all of the songs into iTunes, allow the application to copy the files to the iTunes folder. Once all of the disparate and overlapping folders have been consolidated into one mega folder, I'll use the Show Duplicates function and cull the extras from the list. I expect that'll take a little work as I haven't figured out an automated way to do it yet (got a solution? share it!).

But it will result in a final consolidation of four or five distinct but well overlapped libraries funneling down into one and I expect a space savings near a hundred gigs. Which means I'll be able to start on my next consolidation project of pulling all my photos into one mega-library. That'll be lots of fun, I'm sure.

I wish the repair hadn't taken so long but Apple more than made up for it with the hard drive upgrade. And boy does this MacBook Pro scream (in a good way now!).