May 2005 – Rantinions

Ever wonder how that little “media” key on your “multimedia keyboard” works? It’s not as fancy or great as you thought. First of all it requires Windows Explorer (the main shell) to be running, so if you’ve crashed it out or are running an alternate shell, it won’t work. You may have noticed that it seems to be smart too, it will run whatever media player you choose, for example it may launch WIMP but then you switch to XMPlay and all of a sudden, it starts launching that instead. How clever. Not quite. Here’s the truth:

Whenever EXPLORER.EXE detects that key has been pressed, it goes to the registry and finds the entry for .CDA (the file extension associated with audio CD tracks). It then looks up what media player is associated with it and launches that.

You may say that’s not too bad, but what if you don’t use your computer to play audio CDs? What if MP3s, MODs, WAVs, or some other is your main format and you’ve never associated CD tracks with your favorite media player? What if you want to use different media players for different audio types?

Most importantly of all, it just disappointing to see how basic the way it works is. I thought there was a clever formula behind the scenes that determined what media player to launch. I guess drawing the curtains back all the time has it’s disadvantages, sometimes it’s just a wrinkly old man.

Recently, I was riding the bus and it occurred to me that all of the riders were either cowards or idiots.

It was a bright, warm (but not too hot), sunny day. All of the windows on the bus were as open as they could be. The air-conditioning was on full-blast, making a lot of noise and burning a lot of fuel. And bafflingly, the heater was on!

Like I said, while it was fairly warm, it was not that hot, so having the windows open would have been sufficient to keep the heat at bay, at least it would have been, had the infernal heaters not been blasting heat into the bus, on our legs. (How can the heaters and air-conditioning even be on at the same time? Shouldn’t the bus designers have made that impossible‽) Somehow, I suspect that even if the heaters were off, the air-conditioning would still have remained on, despite the known fact that air-conditioning requires the windows to be closed, lest it be nothing but a waste of energy.

Anyway, I realized that everybody on the bus was either too stupid to notice the idiotic combination of conditions, or were too cowardly to step up and say anything to the driver.

Ostensibly I fall into the latter group; sadly, having social-anxiety disorder made it impossible for me to say anything.