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PawPawArmy-Before Paw Paw's Army Photo - AFTER

A few years ago, I gave my Mom a great present that cost practically nothing.

I used to work close to my grandmother’s (Granny) house and I would eat lunch with her several times a week. She would often have little chores for me to do when I arrived—change a light bulb, get something off a shelf or out of a closet.

One closet retrieval trip I found a huge box of old photos. Some of them were over 50-years old and others I remember from my childhood. We don’t have many photos from when I was young. My Mom’s housed burned and our photos were lost. That was about 15-years ago.

So, I asked her if I could borrow this box and scan a bunch of them in. Granny told me to just take them, she didn’t want them anymore. Reluctantly I took them, knowing they would be safe with me.

It was probably a year later, just in passing, my Mom mentioned how she missed having the photo of her Dad (we called him Paw Paw) in his Army uniform. It, like all the other photos, was lost in the fire.

I remembered seeing that photo in the box Granny gave me. So, I did a little digging and found it. It was a little beat up. So after a quick scan and a trip through Photoshop, I had a great looking photo to print and give to her.

It was the simplest gift, but meant so much to her. Those are the gifts I life to give.

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Back at devLink in August, I went to a few sessions by Jeff Blankenburg and he was a good speaker and seemed knowledgeable. He’s a Microsoft Evangelist, so you expect him to push MS products (that’s what he gets paid to do).

Anyway, the other day on Twitter, he kept talking about the new Zune software and how you could use it without having a Zune. I had never thought about this. I’d been using iTunes for so long – but I don’t have an iPod. Ever since version 5 or so of iTunes, it’s become more and more bloated.

Apple keeps adding features and using iTunes as the default program to manage them all. Meaning, if I just want it to manage my MP3s, I’ve got to install the iPhone management software and other stuff. It also has a few background services that always seem to run (iPodservice, AppleITunesService, etc) and they also seem to interfere with DVD/CD burning unless it’s through iTunes.

So, I downloaded and installed the new Zune software. I recently had to start over on a new computer and had to re-import my library anyway.

WOW! That’s all I can say. The Zune software found and recognized almost all of my 629 CDs and iTunes only found about 120 – the rest I have to manually add. The Zune software also has better artwork and metadata support. It seems to find artwork more often than iTunes and will easily correct your metadata or let you keep it the same.

So, if you’re looking for a nice music / media player and manager, I’d suggest trying Zune Software version 3. I think it’s time to uninstall iTunes.

Drop a new folder in your music folder and the Zune software will automatically add it. It runs faster just seems to be better overall – if you don’t need iTunes specific functionality.

One drawback, Podcast management is no good. You can subscribe, but it will show all episodes of a podcast. You can mark them as played, but they still show in your library, only grayed out. If you delete the file, the title is still in your library and it shows a “download” button. I want to be able to permanently remove it if I’ve already listened to it. Hopefully podcast management will improve in future versions.

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I’ve always been a fan of Metallica, although the last 3-4 CDs before their latest (Death Magnetic) were not that good and that’s saying it nicely. Their newest video for "All Nightmare Long" is extremely cool and harkens back to their first video "One".

In their video, Russians find a Zombie creating spore and unleash it on America in the late 1940’s. It’s a cool story concept and the last minute of the video is extremely creepy. I would definitely watch a feature lenght version of this story.