Keeping up with information technology

There are many options for managing digital information, and I am resolving to find the best solutions and use them properly. I have several criteria.

Looks

I know this sounds shallow, but in my experience, if I don't like how it looks, I'll never be happy with it. Things seem to work as good as they look; if the designers couldn't get it to look good, they probably couldn't get to to work either. I recently had some soft saddle bags stolen off my bike, but I'm not in the least bit bothered because they looked a bit crap, and thus didn't work very well. I hope the new owner enjoys them. I'm going to buy hundreds of dollars of Givi hard luggage instead because the Italians design things that look sexy.

Time

I don't mind spending a lot of time on IT, since it's an important aspect of my life. But I'm not going to waste any time. I want to be able to designate shortcuts. If I have to perform a task repetitively (like renaming photos) I want to be able to do it easily.

Cost

I don't mind spending some money on IT, and I'll willing part with cash to do what I want to do, but hate having to spend moolah to have something I didn't want in the first place. In fact, I'll even pay money to not have things I don't want. Which brings me on to the final point.

Order

I'm a messy person, but when I decide to clean up I demand the right tools for the job. I want to be able to turn off the things I don't like. I want to organise items by dragging them to my desired location.

The good:

• Flickr
  
• Panasonic DMC-FX01
  

The bad:

• Photobox, Snapfish etc - too many special offers, not enough organisation
  
• LG Chocolate - bought it cos it looks good. Hate the menus, broke the touch-buttons and the sliding mech, camera quality, music and in-call sound quality all poor.
  

Certain things are on my brown-list. Blogger, because I think there are probably more suitable platforms out there for my style of posting. Hotmail, because it has become over protective. iTunes seems to have a lot of the same annoyances as Windows Media Player did (I thought it'd be a lot better), but since I despise Media Player 11, I think iTunes will survive.