My site has been going up and down lately. It’s not a problem with MOSS or the server. Both have stayed up and running without any problems. Unfortunately, the environment that my server is in has been having problems with their switch. Apparently it’s rebooting itself constantly, which is “a common issue for this brand and model of router.” Anyway, no biggie, my site isn’t exactly mission-critical. But weekends are the best time for me to work on enhancements, and I have a few in mind that I was looking forward to getting set up. Alas, ’twas not to be. Everything seems to be working now, though, so hopefully it’ll stay this way.

I upgraded to Acrobat Reader 8 last night because frankly, I figured it couldn’t get any crappier than 7. I was right. In fact, it got a bit better. The Yahoo toolbar and advertising bar across the top seem to be gone. The interface is simpler, too. It still has automatic updating on by default, of course, which I immediately turned off just in case the update feature sucks as much as it did in 7.

So it’s getting better. But even without Photoshop Album Starter Edition, which it tries to bundle with the download by default (freakin’ annoying, by the way), it’s still 20.8 MB. My goodness, that’s bloated…

Several of my banks have been “upgrading” their security since the beginning of the year. I have pretty much accepted the fact that “upgrading” security means my blood pressure will needlessly rise the next time I try to access my account.

The latest security craze seems to be these security questions. “Mother’s maiden name” apparently doesn’t cut it anymore. Security questions drive me insane, because there’s invariably a finite set of options I have to choose from. Favorite childhood superhero? Name of firstborn child? What is this crap? None of it is easy for me to remember! Why don’t you let me pick my own question and my own answer? Now I have to remember some “fact” that I made up as an arbitrary answer to some stupid question that a bank decided was an excellent way to distinguish me from some sorry thief.

To add insult to injury, many times I have to select** two or more** security questions. OMG. I hate banks so much.

My pledge bro Craig “Rizzy” Rohe also has a Wii, and he sent me some mini-reviews on some games. Since he has no online presence (yet), I thought I’d post them. But before I do that, here’s what he has to say about getting online with the thing:

First, some bitching about Wii:

Up until 10 minutes ago, all I’ve ever done with the Wii is played games. Very easy, very fun. However, trying to use the internet connectivity and adding friends made me want to punch a little Japanese person in the face. Do they actually expect average people to be able to do this? I’m an embedded systems designer, and I was frustrated with it. Other than letting our Mii’s travel back and forth, is there even any benefit to doing it? Shame on you Nintendo.

Second, games only save to the internal Wii memory. If you want them on the SD card, you have to copy it over manually. Of course, you’d have to do that each time you play the game in order to keep the SD card up to date. It pretty much makes the $50 1G memory card I bought completely useless.

I couldn’t have said it better myself. The Wii online setup is pretty bad. I’m really surprised people are getting it to work without wanting to gouge their own eyes out with a spoon. As for me, I am still using it on my neighbor’s wireless because it won’t work on mine. And yes, I have changed to channels 1/11 on the router. Yes, I have followed all stupid suggestions in the forums and on the support site. Nintendo could take a few pointers from Microsoft in this particular part of the experience.

The SD thing seems strange. I haven’t tried to use an SD card yet, but it does seem odd that you can’t save games directly to it. This does seem like something Nintendo could change with a firmware update though.

Wii Sports – It’s ok. Fun little games to showcase the controller abilities. I’ve found tennis to be pretty fun with multiple people, and you can avoid the dreaded Wii tennis elbow once you learn that a skilled flick of the wrist will do just as much as a full blown swing. I brought my Wii home for Christmas, and since I have a zillion siblings we had continuously rotating doubles matches which were a blast.

Super Monkey Ball – I usually only play the mini games. Not as much fun as the versions for GameCube. I think they tried too hard to incorporate the motion control into the games, and many of them are just too touchy, or they should have put more time into making it fun. I guess they were pressed for time trying to get that one out for launch. There are a few that are pretty entertaining though.

Zelda: Twilight Princess – This game rocks. It’s hella fun to play. They used the motion sensors in moderation, which is good. The game itself is really fun - plenty of puzzles and tangent adventures to try out. I haven’t played any Zelda games since the one for 8-bit Nintendo, but I can still blindly say this is probably the best to date.

Excite Truck – So much fun my head almost exploded. It’s a very fast paced, physics defying game. There’s actually a lot of strategy needed for the more advanced tracks, but at the same time you can just pick a level and have fun doing 720’s at 1000 ft in the air and smashing through trees with power- ups. Definitely one of the best games I own.

Red Steel – I haven’t played this game very much. The reason? My damn arm gets tired. Another example of how not to design a game interface. I think it would be much better if I could play for more than 20 mins at a time, so my review may be biased. Basically, you are required to use the Wii-mote pointer continuously to aim and steer in the game. That’s not even too bad because you could rest your arm on your knee; then they thought up the great idea of requiring you to extend your arm towards the TV to zoom in/out. Combine all of that movement and you have to hold your arm straight out for extended periods of time during game play. Very annoying. Maybe I need to hit the gym.

Haven’t gotten into Twilight Princess yet myself. Elebits should be here from Gamefly this week, though in retrospect maybe I should have put Excite Truck at the top of my queue instead. Oh well, way too many awesome games these days to get to. I still work occasionally, you know.

One of the things that really annoys me about iTunes is the lack of categorical tagging. Actually, I shouldn’t blame iTunes. I think this is a fundamental limitation in the ID3 tags. What I want is the ability to “tag” music as I listen to it, with terms like “story-song” (songs that tell a story) or “ricardo” (songs that my friend Ricardo has introduced me to). Social music sites like Pandora and Last.fm have this concept, as does just about every “Web 2.0” site in the world. Why not my music player?

Initially when I tried to implement this sort of thing I used the “keywords” field. I would just add the tag to that field, then I created Smart Playlists based on that field. This post at Lifehacker suggests using the “Grouping” field, but the premise is the same.

This approach works fine until you want to edit a bunch of songs and **add **a tag. When you do a bulk edit of the keywords field in iTunes it’ll overwrite anything that was there previously. So suddenly tagging all that music with “Sasquatch 2006” removed all the other cool tags you had applied. Major suckage.

Today I decided to try a new approach: I just use dumb, old-fashioned playlists. When I want a new tag, I create a new playlist for it. For organization purposes I keep all tag playlists in a folder called Tags. I can then create additional nested folders for categories, and because of how iTunes handles folders with playlists inside, the folders will become aggregators of all the music in playlists underneath them, which is nifty. This means I can see all of the music I have tagged just by clicking the Tag folder

This approach is pretty simple. Adding a tag is easy, and using the tags to drive smart playlists is easy too. Just add an “If <Playlist> <is/is not> <Tag playlist name>” clause to the Smart Playlist. There is a drawback, though… **Removing **tags is now a pain. From the frying pan into the fire… I have to make sure the song doesn’t appear multiple times in a playlist, and if it does, remove all occurrences. This is because playlists are designed to support multiple occurrences of the same song. If I want to start and end my playlist with My Heart Will Go On, then dang it, I can do it. But for my purposes, it’s not the ideal behavior.

Anyway, none of this really helps my situation, because the iTunes app doesn’t help me manage my tags, build playlists based on them, or anything, natively. All of this is a hack. There are a lot things that it could do to make it easier to tag music. And with the iTunes music store, what if I could check out how other users were tagging the track, and borrow their tags? This is all stuff that is provided by Last.fm, of course, but Last.fm doesn’t manage my entire music collection – iTunes does.

And of course none of this does anything on my iPod. Heck, it can’t even understand playlist folders, which is super super super dumb. Actually, I have a lot of gripes about the iPod UI…