ipad – Welcome to infinitefreetime dot com

I live in the future now; I’ve upgraded my two iThings to iOS 7, which means that for right now I’m fascinated and playing with the NEWSHINY and very soon I will be crying about battery drain and other horrible things and something I liked will stop working. (My prediction for the first gripe: while I like the new Control Center, I’ve already activated it accidentally several times while swiping around on websites. This is going to be a problem. Also, the battery drain on the phone is so horrendous that I’m predicting I already know what the first thing they address with an update is going to be.)

I also have iTunes Radio now, which is going to be a Pandora killer, I think. Then again, I created an Atmosphere station first off (my favorite Pandora station) and right now it’s playing a song called “My Dick.” Which is… something. For sure.

(The song contains the line “We got dicks like Jesus,” by which I assume they mean circumcised, and I immediately forgive it.)

It’s been an uncommonly good couple of days at school, and my two biggest dickheads both got suspended today, so it ought to be a decent few more days as well until they come back. While this year has been pretty high stress in terms of things not involving my classroom, I’m continually amazed at how well the Don’t Yell at Kids policy is affecting my actual teaching. I almost never raise my voice in the classroom anymore; it’s amazing. And it’s not just that I’ve got better behaved students this year, although that’s part of it– I don’t have to raise my voice in the morning class either, and that group, pound-for-pound, ought to be worse than either of my groups were last year.

Not much else right now, I don’t think, although I plan on gluing myself to the computer once the boy goes to sleep later– I need to get working on my two grant applications and there’s no good TV on tonight. Plus iTunes Radio needs a good workout. We’ll see if I find it superior to Pandora or not.

I almost forgot– add this awesome person to your blogroll and start reading her immediately. Because I said so.

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So– hah– this post was gonna start with the words “just a quick note, since I want to be at school by 8:30” when I sat down twenty minutes ago to start writing it, before I 1) decided to look and see how much a song I heard on the radio would cost to download and 2) make sure to download a new album onto my non-3G iPad so that I could listen to it at work today. I was going to spend a couple of minutes talking about this New York testing fiasco, where they switched to a Common Core-based standardized test and, in accordance with prophecy, “proficiency” scores fell through the fucking floor.

Neither of those two things worked, though, and now I’m all “fuck everything digital” and no it has not escaped me that I’m using a computer to write that on the internet, and if you’re so clever how come you haven’t figured out a way to go fuck yourself yet?

One, the goddamn MP3 album was three bucks more expensive than the CD. And that’s bullshit, always. You cannot charge me more to Not Send Me a Thing than you do to Send Me a Thing. The digital version of a thing should always be less expensive than the Actual Thing. And most of the time shouldn’t exist. I’ve been converted to MP3s because MP3s are genuinely more useful than CDs are– yes, I really do want my entire twelve-some-odd-thousand song music collection with me all the goddamn time, because I never know what I’m going to be in the mood for, and my tastes are catholic enough that it’s difficult to even come up with a proper representative sample.

I pay $25 a year for iTunes Match, which is supposed to ensure that everything on my computer also lives in the cloud and can be accessed by both my phone and my iPad. Granted, in the case of the iPad, if I want to be able to listen to something when not in reach of a wireless network I need to specifically download it, but I knew that when I bought the thing.

So why is the fuckin’ album I want to download the only album that doesn’t seem to have shown up on the iPad, almost a week after I initially downloaded it? Hell if I know, and attempting to convince my iPad to find the damn album has unleashed hell in a manner that I don’t have time to describe. Needless to say: technology clusterfuck, and nothing has the right album covers anymore, among other more massive but less obvious problems, and THIS DOESN’T FUCKING HAPPEN WITH CDS, GODDAMMIT, AND MAYBE SOCIETY SHOULD THINK ABOUT THIS SHIT A BIT? Earlier this week just about my entire (small, as I hate them) collection of books disappeared out of both devices. I had to redownload everygoddamnthing twice. Have I ever had to redownload a physical book? Nope, not once, and the total number of books I’ve lost or accidentally destroyed over the course of my life is probably twenty, most of which were lost in The Great Dog Piss Incident of 2009. It happens to digital files all the fucking time.

I fucking hate the future. Also, standardized tests, but I’ll bitch about that later, apparently.