one message with one received fax

One of the things that surprised me in this job is our telephone system is smart enough to detect an incoming FAX and save it. Then it can print it to wherever you want it to go.

However, it will still let you listen to the FAX message if you want, which is about like volunteering to hear shreiking metal bits grinding against each other. YES, SIGN ME UP FOR THAT.

(Somewhere along the line my work phone was a FAX line, so I get to listen to this all the time. And all of the messages are FAX spam, which strikes me as an even worse spam market than e-mail...)

The reason I mention this is that it's one of those features that SOUNDS cool but ends up not being all that spiffy. For example, downloading ringtones for your mobile phone. Perhaps it's better in other parts of the world, but when my choices are some pop song I've never heard of or a selection of spiritual songs I never want to hear, that's not really a choice at all.

There's a new feature in iTunes that lets you browse the album covers of your playlist. This is... um... theoretically good for something. However, if you do not have hardware acceleration or up-to-date video drivers, all you get is an incredibly cryptic message how iTunes cannot display album covers on your computer. At least on Windows.

How this got out of development is a mystery to me. It adds nothing at the expense of taking away useful (to me) functionality, such as hotkeys for the equalizer (which were in just one revision ago) and display of the number of people currently sharing your playlist.

Those features, I would have used. Instead, it's incomplete and broken pawing through album covers. Yeah, that was time well spent.