“A computer is like an Old Testament god, with a lot of rules and no mercy”


Thursday, February 12

All I Wanted Was Some AC/DC

Apparently I'm just not staying in touch enough for my boss. So what did he do? He got me an iPhone.

Now I've resisted getting one of these things because...
  1. It's trendy. I'm not a trendy person.
  2. It's pricey. I didn't have a PDA phone because I couldn't see spending that much money on a phone and the plan. And...
  3. It's Apple. I've dealt with tons of Apple products over the years, and frankly, I think all you Mac people are nuts. Yeah, PCs have tons of problems, but at least they usually give an error code that I can decipher, instead of "An unusual error has occurred, but we have no idea what it was, so have a nice day!"
Now that I've got one, I have to admit...It's pretty freakin' awesome. THIS is what a phone should be. Damn, but in 3 days it has become indispensable. I use this thing for everything. Hell, I don't even open the email client on my laptop unless I need to send something from it.

So, did my boss' nefarious plan to keep me connected to him work? Yeah, I'm connected constantly now. As Forrest would say, "We were like peas and carrots."

Oh, and the AC/DC thing? That's because of iTunes. Yeah, when you get an iPhone, you must sign up for iTunes. Stupid, but I get it. So I'm searching iTunes for some songs earlier, specifically looking for a new ringtone. The ringtone on my old phone was "Back in Black" (except when my wife called, then it was the Imperial March from Star Wars, and let me tell ya fellas, the little woman was not amused when I answered "Yes, my master", especially in the middle of a meeting). So, thinking I could just go download AC/DC's Back in Black to this phone from iTunes' store, I set out to make it so.

No such luck. It seems Apple does not sell AC/DC.

I don't know if this is some sort of plot, or if AC/DC is boycotting Apple, or if Steve Jobs doesn't like AC/DC, or what, but I am very annoyed. Honestly, I don't want some new age pop rendition of Back in Black on my phone, or Hayseed Dixie's version (though I do like them). I want the original. I want AC/DC. Stupid iTunes.

I know I've got the CD around here someplace, now I just have to quit being lazy and actually find it. *sigh*

3 comments:

Armed Texan said...

May I suggest Audacity? Since I have a Cingular/AT&T 8525 (WinMo) phone, I have to make my own ring tones. I use Audacity to cut out just he part of the song I want, mix it down to mono and write it to a highly compressed mp3 (it will be heard through a monaural speaker phone rings after all).

Mad Man said...

Thanks for the tip. I'll give that a try. :-)

Anonymous said...

Actually, you will find that AC/DC isn't available in any downloadable form. They are one of the last big name holdouts on this front. I believe their argument is that they write albums and want their music heard in it's entire context not a single song at a time. Of course, this seems somewhat disingenuous to me as they frequently have songs played one at a time over the radio waves and I'm will to bet have released a "Greatest Hits" at some point. Regardless, I love my MacBook Pro, but Apple still sucks at many things...including iTunes. But this one is not their fault.