My Favourite Sort of Inconvenience

So I've officially joined the slavering legions of Satan. I bought an iPhone.

Let me be frank: I love it. I am very, very fond of the platform. I briefly considered going with a phone running Android, but I was far from impressed by the various telephones on which it was available. The only other contender was the BlackBerry Storm, however its lack of WiFi was a dealbreaker (why pay an additional $20 to $40 each month for an expensive data plan when I spend roughly 90% of each day sitting next to a wireless router, either at home or in the office?), and I also detest using a stylus for input. Many of the apps available are entertaining, useful, or both, and the Safari browser is fantastic.

But I'd hate to leave you with an unqualified positive review.

So, to qualify: I hate iTunes.

I was unable, after many attempts, to install any version of iTunes (v7.3 through v8.0) via Wine, even after much fliddling*, and I have not yet made the decision to jailbreak my phone, so I finally threw up my hands and installed it on my Windows drive. After installation, I synced up my music library, downloaded a few applications, and I was ready to go.

Then came the problem. The next day I attempted to load up iTunes again, and was prompted to install the blasted thing. This puzzled me. I also noted that half of my desktop icons were missing. Interesting. I decided to reboot again. After several minutes, Windows XP (I don't use Vista; I'm not crazy) finally gave up the goat and threw me a missing DLL error. I sighed, booted to Linux, and downloaded the missing file. I noted with some dismay that my Windows drive had not been mounted at boot, and attempted to mount it manually. No dice. I had, it seemed, been the victim of my first hard drive crash.

Cool!

I had Windows installed on a very old 100 GB drive; until iTunes, its only use had been for data backup and Fallout 3. The only real impact that this hard drive crash had on my life was losing my Fallout 3 save data, which in turn necessitated playing through Fallout 3 again. This is my favourite sort of inconvenience.

* Yes, I am an enthusiastic Linux user. That said, I disagree heartily with the many legions of Lin-o-philes who claim that Ubuntu is ready for mainstream use. Hey, I love it, but I enjoy spending hours reconfiguring (read: excising) PulseAudio or adding new partitions to fstab. My father? Not so much.