Everyday on my way to work, I pass the Hostess factory in North St. Louis.  It always smells like butter and warm bread.  Good for the nose, bad for the diet.

Hostess has announced that they are closing three bakeries, including the one I pass everyday.  This is in response to the bakers union going on strike.  It’s a bad situation that just got worse.  Hostess has evidently filed bankruptcy twice in three years.  Their CEO claims that they are ‘days’ away from liquidating the whole company.  So they basically cut benefits and pay to the bakers.  The bakers responded with a strike.  The company just closed the doors on that bakery.

There are no winners in this…  Not the company, not the workers…  This economy is killing companies all over the place.  Now it’s killing the company that brought us American staples like Twinkies, Suzy Q’s, Ding Dongs, Cupcakes, Sno Balls, HoHos, Zingers…  can you tell that I’m fat?

I feel sorry for the people still sitting hopelessly on the picket line.  I drove by them tonight on the way home and they all appeared to be aging folks who may be close to retirement.  They have lost their jobs.  I pray for everyone involved in that company and I hope that somehow I will smell the yummy butter and warm bread again.

Finally, many of you that know me would call me an Apple fan boy for sure.  I love my Apple products because they just work.  For the most part that remains true, but I do believe that the quality control staff must have been fired after Steve Jobs passed away.  iOS6 is a great example…  Maps is awful, changes in iTunes Match have made it unusable on my iPhone, wifi issues, battery issues…  Mr. Jobs would never have allowed Maps to get to the people as it is.

But my main gripe with Apple is and has always been the same…  iTunes blows.  I thought iTunes Match was going to be the greatest thing ever.  It’s so ridiculously buggy, that I have switched over to Amazon’s cloud service.  Apple limits you to 25,000 song on iTunes Match while Amazon ‘limits’ you to 250,000.  The best part is that the Amazon cloud player is SO much more universal than iTunes.  There is an android, iOS, Windows, Mac, Kindle, etc app for the Amazon Cloud Player.  But if you want to use iTunes Match, you better have Windows, Mac, or iOS and hope that it feels like working on that particular day.

I will leave you with that as iTunes on my MacBook Pro “Gathers information about my library” and attempts to upload the 12 songs I asked it to for the eighth time.

peace,
r