One of these days, I’d love to upgrade a computer and have it just work.

The Mac operating system is usually the most painless, and don’t take this as a “This should just work! Die, you stupid ***********!” rant. For every one thing that goes wrong, there are about a hundred things that didn’t. But today was one hell of a day of things going wrong.

I just got a 13” 2.53GHz MacBook Pro last night. Great machine, great specs, plus Snow Leopard. Everything was painless last night—a two-hour session yielding my iTunes and Aperture libraries and all the programs I need. I wake up the next morning and pull open iTunes. “Song could not be located.”

What.

Apparently, half of my songs were still pointing to my external hard drive, although I could have sworn that I had already checked for that last night. But it’s not all of them, just some of them. Completely arbitrary. What do I do? I hit “Locate”, and point to the new file, hoping that iTunes will be smart enough to figure out that that is where all my other iTunes files are. It isn’t. iTunes wants you to go through each one of the songs individually. Screw that, I’m writing a Python script.

I happened to know that iTunes writes out an XML file of its library that you can access with Python’s plistlib. Astute readers will ask, “Hey, Ross, why didn’t you just use ‘Consolidate Library’?” Well, the files were already on my internal hard drive. Everything was copied over correctly; it’s just that the paths were off. I write a script that renames the paths. But now iTunes is complaining that some of the files don’t exist.

What.

Even though the XML file is minutes old, some of the paths in the plist file are just dead wrong. The plist claims there are no track numbers on some of the paths, but the filesystem disagrees. I still don’t get this. However, I dutifully write some logic that checks for these scenarios and finds the correct path. This actually worked for most files, except for a few that I had to correct myself.

The upshot of all this? I still had to rebuild my iTunes library, since I had lost most playlist information, and both my iPods had to be resynced. Ugh.

Later the same day, I need to print something out. I have an HP psc 1350 All-in-one—an average printer from about five years back—that still works great. It is also, unfortunately, one of the few printers that Snow Leopard does not support.

What.

This printer has worked with the default drivers since I’ve had it. My Ubuntu machine can talk to it out-of-the-box, for crying out loud. After much Googling, I find that installing the drivers from HP’s website should work. The drivers from three years ago. Okay, sure. I install them, but find that the damn software keeps popping up a Setup Assistant every time I turn on the computer. How do I make the madness stop?

I find out that in a mislabeled section of HP’s support, there are more recent drivers. I have now downloaded those, and they appear to be working. BLUH.

So the moral of this story is: don’t upgrade optimistically. You will be disappointed. Stay tuned though, because I’m still playing with Snow Leopard’s Grand Central Dispatch, and it’s shaping up to be pretty neat.

I’m not going to tell you how great Google Voice is. I’m not going to tell you that Apple should put the Google Voice apps back on the App Store. I’m not even going to slam AT&T for being a bad cell phone carrier.

I think you know all this.

What Google needs to do is make a killer app—something that’s so useful that the customers demand that phone companies let Google compete. Google’s Voice service is a glimpse at what phones can be, but it’s the little parts of the experience that need work. Yes, I know, most of my problems stem from the fact that I use a “dumb” phone. But ordinary cell phones and landlines need some love, too.

First of all, one of the nice things about living in the 21st century is Caller ID (“Oh geez, it’s my crazy coworker trying to get rich quick. Time for voicemail!”). You can give your number to your friends and then when you call, they see a nice little picture of you come up on their phone. And that’s why Google Voice is supposed to be so great: any phone you call from should show that same caller ID, right? Wrong. As it stands right now, your caller ID will be your Google number only if you go through their website or if you call the number, enter your PIN, hit 2, then dial the number you want. Why can’t I just use the contact list I already entered into my Google Account? Voice dialing? I know Google has speech-to-text recognition; they have Google 411. So what’s my work-around? I still use my cell phone’s directory and people still see my cell number on occasion. Lame.

Next, I try to use Google Voice exclusively for my texting. I don’t have a texting plan, so if I disable sending texts to my cell, I can use the Google Voice website to text and not pay a dime. However, if I’m on the go, this becomes a bit of a problem for two reasons: I can’t start a texting thread without having it show my cell as the sender and I can’t turn text notifications on and off from the mobile site. This is inconvenient. I know, if I had a smart phone, I wouldn’t be having this problem. But a good number of people don’t have web-capable phones.

My last objection to the service is for recording voicemail greetings: why can’t we upload audio files? Before switching to Google Voice, I was using YouMail, which actively promoted uploading your own creative voicemail messages. I whipped up several funny greetings for my friends with audio software that had music and sound effects. With Google Voice, you can record voicemail messages, but they have to be recorded through one of your phones—you can’t upload your greetings directly. I know this isn’t a mission-critical feature, but my friends enjoyed leaving a voicemail when I was using YouMail.

Back before the days of texting and telemarketers, using the telephone was a terrific experience. You enjoyed picking up the phone. Google Voice has the potential to do what Gmail did for email: make communication fun again. Because of the adversity that Google is facing, I fear that Voice may not live up to its potential.

Se7en was the best detective film to have come out of the 90s. Unfortunately, most people don’t remember this movie as much as they do David Fincher’s other masterpiece, Fight Club. I just rewatched Se7en on Wednesday, and I made a few interesting revelations about the movie’s symbolism and themes. Take this all with a grain of salt; I’m sure the movie is open to many different interpretations.

IF YOU HAVEN’T SEEN Se7en, DO NOT READ THIS POST! IT CONTAINS SPOILERS!