Don’t worry, those three aren’t sig­nif­i­cantly con­nected.  I mean, the for­mer two are slowly ruin­ing my life, although they are yet to con­spire together to form some mon­strous plot…  the lat­ter of those two con­tin­ues to frus­trate in the same way as I’ve pre­vi­ously whinged about, whilst the first is com­pletely sep­a­rate and a new issue alto­gether (and the third, well, it’s been around for a few days, but I haven’t had a chance to com­pain about it yet).

See, unlike cer­tain peo­ple (no offense to any­one ;), I only keep *one* diary and cal­en­dar (admit­tedly, they are sep­a­rate phys­i­cal objects, but I make a habit of check­ing BOTH before sched­ul­ing any­thing), with the the­o­ret­i­cal goal of not hav­ing to be in two places at once too often.  And then there were par­ents.  Well, specif­i­cally, a mother, with her OWN cal­en­dar, and her OWN agenda when it came to sched­ul­ing meet­ings with cer­tain den­tal work­ers.  Insert a pun about going “men­tal” here… haha.  Or not.

My mobile is another source of angst.  Apolo­gies to every­one who’s sent me an SMS recently and hasn’t got a reply — this is a case of PEBPAWIBM (Prob­lem Exists Between Phone And What­ever Is Behind Me) in con­junc­tion with an inge­nious fea­ture that will can­cel any mes­sage left too long half-written.  No, really, thanks Sam­sung.  Geez, it’s so use­ful return­ing me to the main menu of the phone — if I were to leave a phone in my pocket with a mes­sage half typed, that is far more dan­ger­ous than an unlocked phone at a dial screen, of course.  And it would be, of course, com­pletely irra­tional to dump me from my mes­sage, for­get it, and then *actu­ally lock the phone so some­thing doesn’t hap­pen by accident* — no, I was using the phone, you couldn’t pos­si­bly lock it.  Dump­ing me to a menu is greatly appre­ci­ated, though.

Sam­sung deserve an award for usabil­ity.  I pro­pose the award be sup­plied in an un-openable box, as an exam­ple of how acces­si­ble prod­ucts should be in recog­ni­tion of their most excel­lent achieve­ments in this field.

On a com­pletely unre­lated note to any of the above, thanks Ben for lend­ing me your 40GB hard­drive… I now have room to breathe in my home direc­tory again (although I have some­how man­aged to ALREADY fill 20GB of that 40… go fig­ure), at least for the next few months.

It’s kind of funny, that.  Six months ago, I would have said that at my cur­rent rate of con­sump­tion, it’d prob­a­bly take me about three years to fill 40GB.  Now­days, I go through about 1GB a week (much of which is sim­ply deleted or burnt to CD, but still) of stor­age space on var­i­ous medi­ums… admit­tedly, this is largely due to my stor­age of the raw audio cap­tures from Plat­form Seven for stream­ing and archival pur­poses, but a lot of it is from other stuff as well… Plat­form Seven accounts for less than half of that 1GB/week usage.

So yes, I now have my music back!!  Yep, I had it before, but my CD’s are in the next room — tech­ni­cally, we’re not allowed to con­vert copy­righted mate­r­ial between medi­ums here in Aus­tralia, but MP3’s (and, in the near future, OGG files) are just so much more con­ve­nient for me that I am past car­ing.  I’ve never heard a com­plaint from any­one about this usage, any­way, even from var­i­ous record asso­ci­a­tions — of course, the issue of “fair use” has never been a promi­nent one, since every­one ASSUMES that Aus­tralia has iden­ti­cal copy­right laws to the US.  Just for the record (haha, get it?), this is not so, and if you’re in a posi­tion to do some­thing about get­ting our laws changed, or know what to do about it, let me know/do something.