We spent a night staying with a friend who was in a house that had a hard-surfaced roof of some kind - the squirrels apparently liked the noise that the roof made when they hurled everything they could find in the trees at the roof. It was LOUD!
McMansions are frequently not well-built - they can be built in a very short time, and quality-control can be quite spotty. Our preference is for older houses, although I might take a newer house if all the problems had been worked out already.
You reminded me of another one that bugs me all out of proportion - we have a neighbour who has a fire just about every evening in summer. The smell of woodsmoke is always in our yard and bedroom, and I hate the smell of woodsmoke. :mad:
Another irritation: When Yahoo! or some other browser links you to a video, which of course is preceded by a 15 to 30 second ad. That is irritating enough, but it’s even worse when I finally get to the main clip only to be told that it can’t be played.
I hate, hate, hate the phrase “date night”. It makes me want to scream. No, it’s not “date night”, it’s my husband and I going out for dinner. If you are dating someone, you’re not going on a “date night”, you’re going on a date. A friend of mine just texted me, “Are we still on for date night Friday?” to which I wanted to reply, “No, but we could be on for “friends going out to dinner” night.”
I know it’s a commonly used phrase, and I know there is nothing really wrong with it. I just hate, hate it.
When TV networks show the trailer for an episode right before the episode is about to air. I’ll be sitting down to watch the latest episode of Walking Dead, and one minute before the episode is supposed to start, AMC shows a “right now, on The Walking Dead.” Just let me watch the fucking episode, already! I’m already tuned in! Spoiling the episode for me right before I’m about to watch it isn’t productive!
I recognize that they probably do this to entice people who watched the previous show but weren’t necessarily planning to watch the upcoming one. I hate it anyway.
That’s not always super clear cut to me. I certainly try to make sure I’m out of another customer’s way, but many gas stations I go to can be entered from both sides, so it’s not obvious whether or not I should pull through to best make way for other customers.
Slow walkers. I was on campus today, waiting for pedestrians to cross before I made a turn. Three people were walking: a student in athletic shoes who ran up to the crosswalk, a guy with a huge cast going from toe to mid-thigh and a crutch, and an elderly woman pushing a large gentleman in a wheelchair. Guess who literally took two lights/pedestrian crossing signals to cross, blocking turning and crossing traffic for both cycles? Yep, the guy in athletic shoes that had just demonstrated that he was capable of running. He didn’t saunter, he didn’t even mosey… he just sort of “galumphed” his way across.
I then had to pull into a garage two blocks away, get a parking ticket, park, walk downstairs, , exit the garage then walk back in that direction. In those 5 minutes, he had managed to walk less than half a block along the sidewalk… and he was walking on the left side of the sidewalk, disrupting the flow of pedestrian traffic. :rolleyes:
People like the moronic chick (I used stronger words this morning) who decided to drive 40 mph in the far left-hand lane on the highway, where the speed limit is 60 mph and most people are driving 70. Oh, and while it’s raining, too. Saw a couple of accidents narrowly avoided while as people realized at the last minute that she was driving like a myopic grandma, and then attempted to pass her. It’s bad enough with all the other yahoos whizzing by on slippery roads – we don’t need slow-ass selfish idiots jacking up the traffic flow.
Give her a break, she was probably texting her BFF or updating her twitter or taking a picture of herself for Facebook or looking up the latest Justin Beiber video on YouTube. :rolleyes:
OH OH - I thought of one! Jaywalkers who expect traffic to stop for them, and people who stop for jaywalkers! One lane stops but the other ones don’t because you’re not supposed to stop for jaywalkers, and it’s all bad for everyone.
I’m married to an artist who insists this. Never understood it and there’s no convincing her otherwise.
Thing that irritates me (though I don’t think it is out of proportion):
People who park at the gas pump and go into the store. Understandable if you’re paying cash, but you shouldn’t wait for your entire family to come back out before leaving the pump, especially when it is one of those gas stations immediately off of the interstate that is completely and utterly packed with a 15 minute wait for a pump.
Even worse are the ones who pull up to the pump, pay at the pump, pump their gas, and then go into the bloody store. Why would you do this when the cars are three deep waiting for you to get out of the freaking way? There are parking spaces for a reason.
I will admit that I get a great deal of satisfaction out of meticulously destroying the UW donation form and dropping the itty bitty pieces into my recycling bin.
Well, sure, stop for them if you’re about to run over them, but don’t stop if you don’t have to. But you know, you run over a few, and that might teach the rest a lesson…
Another one to grind teeth over – I don’t know exactly who is repsonsible for this, so I’m gonna blame iTunes and Rhapsody. But I really hate hearing the results of breaking up long continuous pieces of music into two or more “tracks”. They often do it in mid-note, resulting in one track with an awful sounding ending and another with an awful sounding start.
But I do recall this problem on some CDs and albums from earlier times, so perhaps it’s not fair to the new kids… ah, fuck em’, however many problems there used to be, there are a hundred times more of them now.
When someone starts telling you a story about something interesting or funny that happened to them and you realize it is YOUR story or about someone else you know. How can someone be so delusional or such a pathological liar that they actually believe that something that never happened to them is reality and did happen to them? It would be scary if it wasn’t so pathetic.
You can set albums and individual tracks to be “gapless” in iTunes that will make the tracks play seamlessly. On a PC in album view, right-click on an album, then select Get Info > Options > Change “Gapless album” to yes > OK. For individual songs (such as when three tracks are meant to be unified, like the “Trilogy” at the end of Sonic Youth’s Daydream Nation), choose the individual songs and Get Info > Options > Check “Part of a gapless album” > OK. Obviously, the iPod/Phone will need to be resynced to be aware of the change. I imagine the process is similar on a Mac, but I’ve no experience with it, and I have no clue about Rhapsody.
I do think it’s a pain that the option isn’t pre-selected upon downloading an album that obviously needs it (classical music, live albums, DJ mixes), or when ripping an album that iTunes is able to identify.
Thanks for th info, but I already know that and it doesn’t usually work, because usually there is some dead air on the end of the track either before or after the truncation. So you still hear the note cut off, then a few seconds of nothing, and then the other half of the note you heard a few seconds ago.
And yes, I know I can also go in and tell iTunes to start 2.53 seconds in or end 4.25 seconds before then track ends, but that’s just a big pain in the ass.
Odd. I haven’t run into that myself, but it’s probably because I mostly rip my own CDs. I figured you were talking about the gaps iTunes inserts between tracks being played… sounds like the studios themselves are providing tracks with silent padding to Apple.
