People who don't use Windows may gloat smuggly throughout this entry. Mind you, I consider myself platform agnostic now that I actually have a real PC. I just use the best platform for the job. This means I use my Mac for everything except for playing games that only exist on a PC. Oh, that and copying CDs, since my PC has both a built in CDR and a regular CD-ROM drive so copying is a breeze. And, when I use the PC to copy CD's it doesn't tie up my Mac. So I'm platform agnostic in a sense that I know the MacOS is generally much less annoying than Windows.

I don't encounter software on the Mac that makes me feel stupid. I encounter software on Windows that makes me feel stupid all of the time. I am fairly knowledge Windows user. I actually am a certified SAP Basis consultant for SAP on Windows NT/SQL Server, if you can believe that. Had to take a test, and everything, and even got a watch. So, I'm not a Mac person with his head so far up Steve Job's ass that the idea of a two button mouse causes convulsions.

With that said, I had the pleasure of uninstalling this facist little nuisance of a program from my PC last night. Mac users really don't get to experience the joy of having your computer hijacked by a piece of software. On the PC, this happens all the time. You can install something like AOL Instant Messenger or RealPlayer on your PC, and suddenly every keystoke you type and every file you open is being processed by the damn thing you just installed. Like a bad space alien parasite from a B-movie, it has got its tendrils running so deep into the bowels of your machine your only chance in hell of an escape is doing an uninstall, which frequently isn't available, or doesn't work.

The program in question was MusicMatch. To make matters worse, I didn't even install it, it came pre-installed. MusicMatch might be great for MP3s, but I will never know this because MusicMatch and I never got that far. All I know is MusicMatch was going to make damn sure I used it to play any audio CD I inserted. This might not have been so bad if I could have figured out how to actually get the CD to play. Every time I merely inserted a CD, MusicMatch would launch, and insist I fill in a registration window. I'd skip the registration window, to get a horrible little player interface, with things like hidden landmine buttons that would launch a web browser on the slightest mouse-down event, and a menu bar filled with thrice-deep hierarchical menus.

I just wanted to play the CD, damn it. Clicking the "play" button in the player yielded nothing. Digging around in the menus yielded all sorts of options, like ripping the CD to MP3, playlist management stuff, shuffle play, and goodies like that. But no simple way to just play the CD. To make matters more frustrating, the night before I had struggled with the same thing but somehow I accidentally stumbled upon the magic name of Jehovah in MusicMatch's interface, and the CD began to play. So I knew it could be done! After five minutes of floundering around, like an amnesia-suffering Captain Kirk on an ancient artifact, I still couldn't get it do it again.

Well, why struggle, right? I close up MusicMatch, and decide it's time to use the zero-frills Windows CD player. I open it, only to have it report that the CD drive is "in use." MusicMatch has its evil, controlling tentacles so embedded that it gives me no options. I can't get MusicMatch to play the CD, and MusicMatch won't let any other program even try. Life is too short for this kind of crap. Set phasers on "kill." Good-bye, MusicMatch. One uninstall and one reboot later, I am back in control. A good rule of thumb for Windows is less is usually more.
posted 3:45 PM | link |