iMac, so bad it's evil

By far the worst thing that happened last week was the loss of my iBook. The guys at the apple store attempted to revive it but it was a hopeless cause. I did have one night's elation when it looked as though they would be able to get the remaining data off the hard drive but it was not to be. I had managed to rescue all my photos but the documents they retrieved weren't the ones I needed and the hard drive eventually died while transferring the contents of my iTunes library.
This is where it all got interesting. Steven bought me* a new iMac for my birthday and it is a thing of beauty. Huge screen, super fast and gorgeous. But the Leopard OS is driving me nuts.
For a start there is no AppleWorks any longer, you have to purchase iWorks separately. A fact I was not aware of until I tried to write a document and the iMac requested $80 before I put virtual pen to virtual paper. Nice.
Then I wanted to automatically upload the photos I'd taken of the kitchen to Flickr. Flickr and Leopard aren't yet compatible. I'd put that down to teething troubles except that I can't upload photos to Blogger either. Apple would prefer I used .Mac to publish on the web and thats an add-on too. $70 a year for web-hosting. At the moment I have to select the photos I want to use and drop them on the desktop where blogger can see them. Another step I don't need to be doing.
But the most irritating thing is the sync with my iPod. I used to be able to transfer the contents of my iPod to my iTunes Library. Not anymore. The only things I can transfer now are those purchased at the iTunes store. And I do have one song I purchased and one I got for free, neither of which it would kill me to live without. I do, however, have another 1000+ songs that were downloaded elsewhere or imported from cds I no longer have, and those tend to be the ones that get played most frequently. So I won't be "erasing the contents of my iPod and syncing the new iTunes library. I will, however, be waiting for a hack to solve the issue. Or for Santa to buy me a new teeny, tiny iPod nano, in red, so I can play the new cds I got for my birthday at the gym. Which is probably what Mr Jobs wants me to do.
Right now I'm transferring all the songs that didn't make it off the iBook, and that I still have, from cd to computer. So far it's taken all week and I'm about half-way through. Anything to do with decorating the house for the holidays or maintenance on said house will just have to wait.
*Steven has suggested turning my office into a media room so we he can watch movies on the flat screen.