I know I always bitch about something that is trivial, but man I just love bitching. Here��s my complain: all the DVD store and restaurant, please, please stop stretching your 4:3 TV screen ratio to widescreen. This is so extremely irritating. Just because you can stretch the regular TV signal to fill up the widescreen plasma TV doesn��t mean you HAVE TO DO IT. It really distorts the picture, making all the people on the screen FAT, and damn this is just not right. And the fact that a lot of people do exactly that at their home when they watch regular broadcasting TV signal on their widescreen plasma or LCD TV is even more fascinating. I can understand the mentality of restaurants and music stores. They are in business, they are used to take advantage of things for no good reason (greedy asshole mind set), so it��s by their nature to ��fully utilize�� their plasma TV screen. But for AV lovers who shelled out tens of thousands for the luxury to enjoy high quality TV picture, it just doesn��t make sense that they INTENTIONALLY stretch the TV picture to non-proportional way just for fill-up-the-screen. Damn, this is just like using top quality audio system to listen to Twins CD.

Damn, am I a bitch or what?

Windows XP (or may other OS using Windows 2000 kernel) has this strange problem that the system cannot delete a file when a file path is getting too long. For most case this is not a problem since you usually don��t create a file with file name ��this is a very long file name so that I can mess myself up for no good reason.doc��, but more than often I will move files inside a folder in order to organize information in a tidy away, and then maybe moving this folder inside another folder. After a few iteration, and you will get a file path that excess the 255 character limit.

Usually this happens to me when I move folders inside folders in my _2BTrashed folder (a folder that I store stuff I will eventually delete but a bit hesitates at the moment). And then when I try to delete the whole 2BTrashed folder, I got error message.

The solution of the problem is usually manually moving the folders out to the root level one by one. While this works, I hope that Windows can at least warn me when I was moving the file, and not wait all the way until I delete them.

Speaking of feature that is nice-to-have, there are also some features that I wish my iRiver iHP-140 (40 GB hard disk based MP3 player) can implement. In fact, when my iHP-140 broke down (which probably won��t happen until after a few years), I may switch to iPod for the following reason.

- normalize songs so that they all sound at the same volume level

- Ability to mark a file ��listened��. This is important for audio books.

- A more effective way to forward in an audio file. This is important when I listen to recorded radio show.

Recently, iRiver releases a firmware update (1.50). While it fixed some problem, it still doesn��t address the problems I mentioned above. In fact, I don��t know if iPod provides a solution for the complain I have above. Guess I have to wait for some media player in the future.

You know what, I bet Apple is actually working on a media player that looks like iPod but plays both video and audio. They may already have it done, just to wait for the right time and right market. Portable media player is a huge market, and judge by how good iPod does, I am pretty confident that Apple can do the magic again.