Are We There Yet?

It's always been a pet peeve of mine when software installers (and uninstallers, for that matter) treat a user's desktop and registry as their own personal playground. As far as I'm concerned, I'm leasing that space out to an application until further notice. It's a temporary home, not a permanent one. As such, an application would do well to not make any assumptions about where it's okay for them place shortcuts on my computer. If it's going to ask me what directory and program group I want it installed in, it's not a stretch of the imagination to believe that I'll also want to dictate whether or not the application is worthy of acquiring a piece of the the limited (and valuable) real estate afforded by the quick launch toolbar and system tray.

But of course, not every company out there sees it my way. One of the worst offenders of this dictum has always been Apple. It's difficult to enjoy all the media offered on the Internet without installing Apple's QuickTime media player. As an iPod owner, it's virtually impossible to go without installing iTunes, which requires installation of QuickTime as well.

Last Wednesday, I began a cross country trek from SE Wisconsin to Western New York (or WNY as they seem to refer to it) to attend my oldest brother's college graduation. Previous to this trip, the longest I had traveled by car as the primary driver was a 5.5 hour trip a suburb of Detroit, MI for a friend's wedding. Of course, that was a very different trip from this one as gas was around $2.00 / gallon and I was not traveling with 2 kids under the age of 5.

As much as I'd like to say that a lot of preparation went in to the planning of this trip, that's not true. It's just not me to study the course, anticipate and plot potential problems, and make out contingencies. I searched for directions on various online map sites (namely Google Maps, Yahoo! Maps, and Windows Live) to ascertain that they all agreed on the route to take (they did). As we were leaving on a weekday, we planned to leave in the evening and drive through the night to make it easiest on the kids and avoid traffic in the metropolitan areas (e.g. Chicago and Cleveland). The return trip was scheduled for a Sunday making traffic a mostly moot point, especially since Chicago traffic would be normal that evening after the Cubs and White Sox played each other that afternoon. Therein lies the extent of my cross country driving plans.

So, five days later, my brother has graduated cum laude with a B.B.A and I've returned from my trip. What follows are my observations...