The number of times in American Jonny and I got asked to explain where we were from, I could have done with this.

iTunes keeps crashing on me, new version Mac 7.0.1 and sometimes after changing songs or changing screen view in the app it quits, and gives me a re-start/re-open/report screen. (edit: oh, yeah, I posted about this a few days ago already – brain dead)

Talking of crashing, Mac OS X took a nose dive on me yesterday. That wasn’t fun, especially as I had to record three hours of audio to my HD after it. Turned out it was the fault of my Creative USB Audio hardware.

I’ll post the scary image I was presented with up here shortly.

Anyone who codes has a language of choice. Not sure I do yet, but I know what I don’t like. JAVA! Especially Java GUIs. The last five days have been an absolute marathon of writing a Calendar for my Individual assignment part of the MEng Comp Sci Advanced Group Project. So many ways to do the same thing in Swing and AWT and others I believe…. Leading to such confusion.

Why not just fire up Visual Studio, drag and drop components, and write the code itself in half the time.

Java
[code]

private String blah;
public String getBlah()
{ return blah; }
public setBlah(String b)
{ blah = b; }

[/code]

c#.NET
[code]

private int x;
public int X {
   get { return x; }
   set { x = value; }
}

[/code]

Ahhh that’d be nicer. Then of course there’s all the weird junk to deal with like the c# webservice code (with all its commented tags – no-one told me they were for serialization purposes…).

Let’s all use Lego instead.

Oh, and poor dave, his macbook pro’s power thingy blew up on him. Hope I don’t have similar problems. None yet. Of course… on day 367 of my ownership something will go fizz…

7.0.1 is so wonderful, great, fixes all those bugs in iTunes 7.0…

OH NO IT DOESN’T.

7.0 never crashed on me, that given I didn’t use Video or ‘Cover Flow’, but 7.0.1 has crashed every half hour at least of use in the last three days. Not happy.

So part two then…

After our night at the Red Roof in St Louis, Missouri we started the long drive West. So, in no particular order…

Stanton Reptiles looked scary so we didn’t go. Scary because there were three rough lookin’ guys standing outside looking intimidated. So we drove.

That was on the road to the Caves, suprisingly I can’t remember their name because there were signs approximately every 3 metres along the road for a 50 mile stretch advertising. Something-alec… Meramec caves maybe. It irritated so much we decided against it. When we headed onto the old Route to experience it a bit after a long-ish drive on the Interstate. Somehow the cave people managed to put the route right through their land and make it impossible to get out. THREE MILES on rough old roads back up to the interstate kinda-way put MO on the Hate List! Candidate for the Stupidest thing: Lebanon Starlite Bowling…. We read from the tour book: “… you can bowl across the street… ” and thought wow, that sounds like fun. Bowling on a street, eh? Up and down, up and down, up and down… Nope. No bowling alley! So we asked someone where to go (turned out it was the sheriff – i think he actually had a shotgun on his dash) and followed directions. We found it. and walked around. No street to bowl over. Looked at the book again: “Stay overnight at the Munger Moss motel. You can bowl across the street at the…” AARGH. Foolishness :-)

Onward… The Stonehenge replica in (urr…. can’t remember town name – i’ll fix and edit this later). Plenty of silly town names to laugh at (Baghdad for example). Totem Pole Park was a ‘less-scary’ introduction to Indian culture and bits and pieces like Totem Poles for example. And the lady inside is lovely. The Wigwam a couple of miles up the road was a scary place with scary people and they made you buy $2 minimum and it wasn’t even any good. Don’t go in! RUN AWAY.

Stayed in Claremore that night; it was a nice wee town, but we were too late to stay in teh Carriage House B&B where apparently you get Cookies for supper. That sounded fun. I think that was the night we went to a Steak and Shake which was fantastic. FAN TAS TIC.

More later.

And yes I’ll fix the mistakes, errors, exceptions and stupidities.

D :-)