It could just be that I'm an iTunes newbie, but...

I've been around the block enough times to know you can pretty much twiddle with the details of any moderately large software application to get it to do what you want... most of the time. (My mind turns back to an early submarine warfare simulation called "GATO," where there was an advanced level of play in which your assignments were revealed to you in Morse code... many games are like that.)

The same does not appear to be true of iTunes, however, though its user defaults are pretty "plain vanilla."

Generally speaking, if you can get over what I view as "the-iPod-is-your-music-collection" paradigm, iTunes is not all that bad a program. But one thing I've noticed for a long time is that it very jealously guards the gates of its "Podcast" area. If, for example, you've previously downloaded a bunch of podcasts from the Internet, importing them into iTunes doesn't get them registered as podcasts, as far as I can tell. (I'll be grateful, BTW, if someone can point out where I may be wrong in all of this.)

More to the point, I recently decided to subscribe to - as in pay for - the "Coffee Break Spanish" podcast, which offers an extra podcast and some other goodies among its premium content. But by subscribing to the new podcast stream, I end up with two podcast subscriptions: one to the non-premium podcast and a second to the premium one.

Now, if the premium feed offered only the premium podcast, there'd be no problems. But the premium feed offers both the premium and the non-premium feed, and therein lies the rub: in order to get just one copy of the non-premium feed, I need to unsubscribe from one of the feeds (presumably, the non-premium one).

However, if I delete the non-premium feed from my iTunes list of subscribed-to podcasts, the eleven podcasts I've downloaded via that feed cease to exist (as far as iTunes and my iPod are concerned) even if I physically copy those already downloaded eleven files to the appropriate iTunes directory. (I suppose one alternative would have been to unsubscribe to the non-premium podcast and then let it lie there, like an eyesore, in my list of subscribed-to podcasts.)

So, anyway, I'm slowly re-downloading about 160 MB of stuff I already have, just so it shows up in iTunes, which I think is pretty silly.

But I'm in a silly mood, and bandwidth is (almost) free.

Cheers...

Keeping it under control...

Over the past couple of days, I've really gotten into using the Zotero exension for Firefox, as it represents a solution - in terms of ease of use and finding stuff again - that's head-and-shoulders above my old, linear list of bookmarks (half, if not more, of which are obsolete and/or no longer of interest). With Zotero, I can create a collection of data for a particular assignment (as I've done for the most recent job to arrive) that can be saved, notated, searched, etc. in case I run into a similar assignment later on, or in case someone wants to go to the mat to discuss terminology.

My most recent assignment, BTW, is from yet another client in Russia (YACIR?), and is turning out to be one of those texts... well... let me put it to you this way: My most recent inserted comment reads, "The Russian is ungrammatical, so I'm basically making this up."

Speaking of which, I'm finally getting used to embedding questions, remarks, etc. as honest-to-Cthulhu, genuine comments in Word (as in: Insert|Comment off the menu bar), as opposed to my previous idiotic quaint habit of highlighting text that needed attention later and relying on memory to recall later why the text was highlighted (which further required my clients, should they ever see such text, to exhibit paranormal powers to figure out at all... that or an email, but I digress...).

At the rate I'm committing words to phosphor, I'll be finished with the job by 10:30, which may allow me to submit the job one day early (though I would not be surprised to see some feedback in tomorrow morning's email). If that's feasible, that'll be the way I'll go. One thing I cannot do is go to bed too late, because I agreed to do a telecon tomorrow morning.

Back to work!

Cheers...