Personal

Tracing back to what would be a defining moment in my life is the Atari XM-301 300 baud modem for the old Atari 8-bit systems. Of course I didn't know it at the time, but there was no turning back once I had called my first BBS and chatted with the SysOp. I would eventually run a BBS a few years later off a floppy disk on my Atari 1040ST, once I had my own phone line. I still remember our old main house line number in Rockford and the BBS phone number. I still have the US Robotics modem that ran the last version of my BBS, and it still works, and still has the 'Not for Resale' badge on it due to obtaining it through the BBS SysOp program way back when.

Why did I sleep so late
Lost my mind for seven days straight
If I go for seven more
Paint an eight on my door

I haven't had much to talk about lately - just been busy with life.
Inspiration comes and goes, and it seems to be coming back again, slowly but surely.

#1. Prevent applications from stealing focus. As an example, while I have been typing this blog entry, iTunes has stolen focus on me over a dozen times to tell me that is a processing a new directory while adding files to the library. If I minimize a program to the tray, I want it to stay there until I restore it or flash the tray to notify me that it has an important message for me. Please behave and honor my requests. I'm only picking on iTunes at the moment because it keeps driving me mad in the past 10 minutes. I accidentally hit the space bar when iTunes popped up unexpectedly and canceled my music import.

#2. Kill off modal dialog boxes that prevent using a multithreaded application - three applications that suffer from this off the top of my head are Windows Media Player, Winamp and iTunes, when adding files to the library. I understand adding and removing files from the library has to be an atomic operation to prevent race conditions, but I should be able to play songs while the process runs in the background. You could argue that this is an application problem more than an OS problem, but I've seen plenty of OS operations use modal dialog boxes when they were not necessary.

This isn't a problem only on Windows, because I've seen and suffered the same behavior on OSX and Linux.