steven n fettig's Jitterin' Thoughts

Well, with my unmentioned and unplanned hiatus being declared over, I have some observations to make:
1) I wish people would not use the target="_blank" tag for href so liberally. I am very guilty of having done this for many years on my own site. I really regret it now. I hate pop-up windows and whenever someone uses the "_blank" tag in a situation where it really isn't necessary, I find myself unnecessarily irritated. Much of the use of "_blank" was due to my own ego and not wanting to let [you the reader] go. If my stuff is good enough to read, you'll return anyway. For those tech saavy people out there, you use tabs anyway, right?
2) The latest iTunes and Apple Music Store are addictive beyond belief. Now, this is music downloading I can sink my teeth into. If you don't know what I'm talking about - or have no interest in online music services - then skip to 3. The third generation iPod is also the first MP3/portable music player to really catch my attention. Why not Gen. 1 and 2? Because they are smaller and can hold more data. I am going through the process of ripping all my CD's to AAC files (I hate it when friends want to share MP3's, so I'm choosing a format that makes it more difficult) and am finding that I will be well above the 15Gb mark by the time I'm done. I want to take my whole collection with me when I go somewhere - it was so annoying to try and figure out what my music tastes would be ahead of time. In the here and now world, I like the concept of being able to decide when the time comes.
3) Of all the crap I have had to wade through, the worst was backing up my PowerBook because the trackpad started to work erratically (more specifically the click button). It made me really think about how fantastic my run has been with hardware running FreeBSD. I am not trying to make a comparison here, though - I know we are dealing with apples and oranges (one is a laptop that gets banged around and the other simply sucks juice from the nearest outlet and barely gets touched). It made me realize, however, how fortunate I have been to have implemented a system that needs very little attention. If you want a solid OS for server solutions, I would again highly recommend FreeBSD.
4) My wife, Stephanie, writes better in English than I ever did in German... (She's from Germany, I'm from the US and I lived in Germany for about 2 1/2 yrs all together.) So, anyone who has dealt with writing technical papers in another language, you know what a feat this is.
5) I don't like weblogs that don't use permalinks. That is, if you write in journal form (most notably using weblogging tools), you really should use some sort of permalink structure. Those using MovableType have no excuse not doing so. Why am I adimant about this? Because, it gives one the possibility of giving exact notation - i.e. I would like to credit someone where credit is due - and I would also like to make sure the credit is given for the correct text. I simply don't see a reason at this time why you wouldn't use them... Comment if you disagree.
6) Do you notice odd fade-in's and out's with iTunes?