I’ve been running into a couple problems lately with iTunes 7.0.2.¹, one of which is a full crash.

• I use a short playlist, which updates live, to give me a random selection of things I haven’t heard in a while. From time to time, it just stops playing at the end of a song. There’s no apparent cause, and no apparent side effect if I start playing again.
• Once in a while, as a song is finishing, I’ll hear a couple hundred milliseconds of the start of that same song again. It’s just long enough to recognise that it’s the beginning of that song. However, as soon as the song actually changes, a notice of fatal exception pops up, asking if I want to send an error report to my IT department. They probably don’t care about iTunes, so I don’t send, but the music stops and I have to restart the program. If this were an actual bug report, I’d also mention that the song stats don’t get updated, so the bug triggers before the song changes, even though I hear the next song begin.

I’ve been tempted for a while to install Rockbox on my iPod, and maybe do away with iTunes all together. I wonder if this is enough of a push in that direction…

¹ Aside from not finding the New Zealand iTunes store.

Christmas lists should always contain book lists. This is a start, but I’ll keep the more technical books off of this list. They’re just far too expensive.

• Stretching and Flexibility by Kit Laughlin was highly recommended in my sports massage class, and if anyone needs to stretch more, it’s me.

It has been waiting in the processing queue far too long, but I’ve finally gotten my first professional publication out the door. It’s an internal technical report on some audio research that I was working on early this year, but it’s official and bears my name as the primary author. In reality, it’s not too different from any of the other documentation that I’ve written for various projects over the years. However, this seems somewhat more important, given that it’s for a research institution.