After two days of computer wretchedness, there are some questions I’d like answering. These questions are, of course, both angry and rhetorical; I expect no answers of any substance (of course, if people can provide them, that also would be appreciated). Firstly: why don’t email programs, or music programs, provide all the data they keep in a handy single file or folder that can be easily transferred between program instances?

To illustrate: I formatted my computer. To back up my iTunes library I had to export an XML file (which was promptly corrupted). To back up my Thunderbird mail, I had to transfer the entire contents of my profile onto a different drive; on attempting to restore it, I managed to get the profile working, but the mail was nowhere to be seen. Indeed, the program seems actively bent on not reading it; it keeps creating new folders with “-1″ suffixes so it won’t have to use the old ones, with all my emails in!

So there’s that. There’s also the perennial “why is Windows so terrible?” question, but it’s not one we should concern ourselves with. I content myself with the thought that, as far as my needs are concerned, the alternatives are either worse or out of reach (at least for the moment). One good recent upgrading experience was WordPress, which I updated to 1.5.1 in not very long at all. Totally painless. However, I still want to know when someone’s going to make a version available with multiple blogs, because I need it for an upcoming project.

Of course, if you want a really usable product you should head over to 37signals and sign up for Backpack, which has received attention of late. They also have a blog, which is well worth reading if you’re into the kind of things they’re into, which you’re probably not, although everyone likes a beetle.