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Today I was watching “The Wire” season 3 while getting some work done.  By mistake I ended up hitting the “title” button and was greeted with the following error message.

 ”DVD Player encountered a system error, -69889″      

After doing some google’ing and some Apple - Support - Discussions searches this thread was all I could find regarding that error.Personally I don’t think it’s an issue with my DVD drive. VLC was able to play my DVD fine. Moreover I tried rebooting and deleting the file com.apple.DVDPlayer.plist in ~/Library/Preferences.  My disk was also clean.Anybody else have any ideas?  I’ll post a screen shot when I get a chance of the error and if I find a solution I’ll post it also. 

UPDATE: Today I came home and installed some software and ended up doing another reboot thus clearing up this issue.  Hopefully this issue was just a one shot deal but I would consider this a resolved issue. 

A purchase that has bugged me for months has finally been put to rest.  Last week my iMac was running so slow multitasking I caved and purchased a 2GB kit of Crucial RAM from Newegg.

With a mail-in rebate the credit card damage was in my price range and my mac being non-intel any speedboost was warrented. I’ve been working on photos recently and having multiple applications open and trying to listen to music at the same time was getting more and more painful.  The bloat of some of these applications was hitting hard and extra memory should help.

The installation was a breeze and I was able to compress air some  the dust bunnies out of the case. Tonight I will use Onyx to do some maintenance on my OS and when Leopard comes out do a clean installation on my box.  Regardless in my opinion if you want to get any work done with Tiger the speed boost 2GB of RAM delivers is welcoming.  To mimic jja’s reaction to 2GB….sweet….

Today Apple CEO Steve Jobs delivered a special announcement from the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts Theater in San Francisco (watch here). For Apple fans who are iTunes users and potential iPod buyers today was a pretty big day. New iPods were released/refreshed and iTunes 7 was released.

For as long as I can remember it’s been a love/hate relationship between me and the tunez. I’ve never been a fan of how unresponsive the application is as a whole. When I started with digital music Winamp was my baby and was always quick to the punch. iTunes has always felt slugish and bloatware’ish. On the flipside the playlist functions are always improving and personally I have almost 100GB of music so having flexible playlists is VERY important. Also as a OS X user there aren’t any other viable alternatives to iTunes really.Today I installed iTunes7 and have some gripes and some praise for this release.

For some time I’ve had my music on network shares and right now I have my iMac connected to the network only on wireless. In my living situation it makes it next to impossible to have a straight LAN connection to my network. As an iTunes user this is utterly frustrating. Loading songs in iTunes 7 seems to bring a longer delay when skipping and making updates to mp3 id tags brings once again a long delay.

Once getting iTunes 7 installed I noticed my machine just came to a total crawl. Then I noticed iTunes was doing something I didn’t ask it to.

Right after opening the application it started going though a good majority of my music and doing this process. I never got a prompt I can’t even find a setting to turn it off. When launching iTunes I have to cancel this every time just to make my computer function. Others have reported this process takes just a few minutes but when all my music is shared over a network iTunes seems to HATE it. Any findings on how to make this process better please send it my way ASAP.

Now on to purchased and stolen features. When browsing the iTunes overview website I noticed something I’ve seen before. Coverview was an visualization for itunes I tried out a long time ago and found no use for. Apparently Apple purchased the technology and incorporated into iTunes. To be fair during a party people may find this feature attractive. For everyday use it’s pretty much unimportant.

Also about a week ago I installed the newest Windows Media Player 11 Beta 2. From what I can see iTunes “borrowed” a few playlist options from them. The “show items in a list grouped with artwork” feature seems to be totally ripped from WMP. I can’t ever remember another media player offering this feature and when I tried WMP last week it was my favorite part about it. A comparison….

WMP 11 b2

iTunes7


Quite similar IMO. To be honest this is my favorite feature of iTunes 7. WMP does it better though

To close this way to long post up iTunes 7 is a mixed bag. I like the new playlist options but having my music on a shared network drive is becoming quite a burden. Before upgrading people in a similar situation as myself may want to wait. Personally I’m always on the lookout for fixes and I will post anything I find.

Update: Another reason to hate Apple. While chatting with jja I noticed that Apple must have VERY QUIETLY removed student discounts on iPods. Really…REALLY…weak…shame I’ll never buy another one for a very long time. Jerks

Update 2: Apparently reports have come though of Student Discounts on iPods still available in Brick and Mortar Apple Stores.  Interesting but I bet it won’t last long.

Today I decided I wanted to try some new software. After having some frustrations with Wordpress and it’s annoying Write Post function that apparently bombs out using IE/Firefox as well and pretty much missing functionality in Safari. So today I downloaded the “trial” of Ecto. So far it seems to be working pretty damn well. I put in my server information and the application picked up all my information and hopefully putting up this post doesn’t destroy my blog. The photo is stolen from Concerned my favorite webcomic.

This post is going to suck total ass why I try out this shit.

AND HERE IS A REALLY CUTE PHOTO OF VANBERGS :-*

Ok I think this program is pretty cool lets see how this uploads