Everyone has quirks.  I have a ton of quirks.  (Do I ever… just ask John.)  The cats have quirks. (Merlin will purr while she bites you, and Percival likes to lick your feet when you have just gotten out of the shower.  Maybe he likes the taste of slightly soapy water?)

And a lot of my electronics and machines have quirks.

My (admittedly ancient) iPod will occasionally randomly wipe its entire hard drive.  So sometimes I will get into work, go to turn it on, and find that I have a completely empty MP3 player and no tunes to listen to as I code.

I always have to start IE twice on my work laptop before it will take.  99.9% of the time it encounters some kind of “fatal error” and crashes the first time that I try to start it.  I suspect that this is caused by the fact that I have about 6 different web browsers installed on my work computer (the better to test code with, my dear) and not all of the play well with each other.  However, out of all of them, IE is the only browser that has issues.

I always have to start iTunes twice on my home computer.  The first time I start it, it acts like it wants to go through the whole first-time-installed setup routine.  Which I always just cancel out of and double-click the shortcut again.  Whereupon it starts up like normal.

My HTC smartphone has a home screen display that shows the temperature and weather where I am (based presumably on GPS) and mostly this is Dayton.  Except for sometimes when the phone has a little spaz and decides to display the temperature and weather in Miami instead.  (Miami, Ohio?  Miami, Florida?  Who knows.)

The universal remote doesn’t always turn every component of the home entertainment center (TV, tuner, DVD player) on or off when it is supposed to.  (John says that this is because I have poor aim with the remote.)

But these are all just little things, and for the most part I just shrug and let them go.  I don’t think that any of them are indicative of a larger problem, and it just isn’t worth my time or effort to try and figure out how to make sure that all of the electronics in my life work the way that they are supposed to 100% of the time.

I suppose that I find it comforting that my electronics are just as quirky and imperfect as I am…

John and I both prefer to listen to NPR when we are driving anywhere.  This can make road trips (to see his folks, to see my folks, to go to SCA events) interesting since here in the midwest good radio can be hard to come by.  There are a lot of country-western or Jeeeezus! radio stations, however, if that is your thing.  It is not our thing.  (We also have no real interest in getting satellite radio, which would also solve our problem.)

Inevitably, somewhere half-way through a trip to where ever, punching the station seek button on the radio over and over in the hops of finding something worth listening to, one of us will comment on how we should have downloaded a bunch of NPR podcasts for the trip.  We do this every time, and up until the most recent trip, always forgot about the podcasts until we were already in the car, and about half-way to somewhere.

I had resolved that we wouldn’t fall into that trip for the trip to NORAD, and the afternoon we were leaving I emailed John at work to find out his podcast preferences, and then left my office a bit early to download podcasts, pack, and other assorted last-minute chores.

I managed to download 4 Radiolab episodes and 1 Car Talk episode to my iPod before we had to leave.

Radiolab is awesome.

Everyone should listen to Radiolab.

After we got back I downloaded every single Radiolab episode that I could find.  (Warning: the Radiolab download server is about as quick as molasses, so I recommend downloading in the early morning.  It seemed to work best then.)

We have finally gotten into the wide world of podcasts.  I cringe at how long it took us.