A giant spider crabI get this way every February, this year it’s taking more time to go away than normal thanks to the lingering effects of winter. I suffer from the whole “seasonal affective disorder” nonsense, which is really a PC way of saying I become a crabby little jerk when winter overstays its welcome. Even though I can have my share of good times in the snow, if I don’t see some sunlight consistently for a few weeks, I get irritable. I’m irritable right now, so let me vent with a few of my pet peeves.

Adobe. I don’t want to update your stupid software. Don’t ask me every time I start one of your programs. I might consider it if it didn’t just take me 11 minutes to update Acrobat Reader, during which if I even thought about opening any of your other programs, they threw a conniption.

Apple, no thank you, I don’t want to update iTunes. If you were offering me some functionality or heck even a new icon or something, I might consider it, but just updating because you have a new point release? Bugger off.

Microsoft, stop rebooting my damn computer after your updates. You could at the VERY least tell me that you are going to reboot my computer and have the common courtesy to make sure that all of my programs are closed. If they’re not, how about stopping your reboot process? Maybe I’ve got something open that I forgot to save?

Wireless network, stop being broken all of the time.

HD TV, if you’re going to be all hyped and “the next big thing”, how about offering more than, oh I don’t know, 2 frigging HD programs per night? Once the regular shows come back on I know that there will be more programming, but I have a dozen HD channels which I pay an extra fifteen bucks a month for, and right now two of them are showing news in HD, and that’s IT!

Side-Rant here, I watched Casino Royale last night on regular DVD up-converted via my HD DVD player, and I have to say, having watched Bourne Identity in HD DVD the other night, there is very minimal difference between the two formats. A good print, properly upconverted is nearly as good as a high definition movie. Maybe once movies are all shot in High Def digitally, there will be significant differences (300 looks incredible in HD DVD, and is much crisper than the comparable DVD), but that leaves a massive back-catalogue that will still look “okay” in High Def DVD.

Folks who buy the old Stanley Kubrik movies like The Shining on High Def formats are just being silly.