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We were having a wonderful Thanksgiving dinner that couldn’t be beat. Our guests mentioned that the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in NYC had a great Tim Burton show. They remarked on his wonderful drawings and figures. I mentioned that Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas was one of my favorite movies. They said they had never seen it. I volunteered that I had the DVD and we could watch it after dinner.

I searched for the DVD while everyone else ate dessert. I could not find it. I checked the spreadsheet that I used to maintain my catalog when I bought optical media—CDs and DVDs. It turned out that although we had owned the VHS tape of The Nightmare Before Christmas, I never bought the DVD version. I had confused the soundtrack CD, which I have, with the DVD.

I thought, “No problem. We will rent it from Amazon Video on Demand and I will play it for the family and guests on the home theater PC (HTPC) hooked up to the home theater system.” Unfortunately, The Nightmare Before Christmas is a Disney title and not available either to rent or buy as a download from Amazon.

My next step was to start iTunes on my main computer and see if the iTunes Store had it. The iTunes store does not rent movies. They sell them. The Nightmare Before Christmas was available for $14.99 plus tax. I thought it’s a holiday. We have guests. Why not?

Why not is because I forgot what a torture it is using iTunes and the iTunes store. I turned on the HTPC and started iTunes. As always, there was a newer version of iTunes that they wanted me to download. I had version 7 installed but iTunes 9.02 or something like that is the current version. So I thought why not update?

Why not is because it took me 20 minutes to download the 90MB file. Why not is because it took another 20 minutes to install iTunes and all the attendant crap software that Apple shoves down the Internet pipes with it. I was reasonably patient.

So after 40 minutes I finally got to launch iTunes. But lo, I couldn’t order the movie yet because iTunes had to update the iTunes library first! That took another 15 minutes. After that it wanted to update the album artwork. I had enough (I thought) and cancelled that activity, because I could.

So now iTunes was running. I went to the iTunes store and searched for the “nightmare before” and found music and the movie. I went to purchase the movie.

I could not. iTunes was not authorized on this computer and I had reached my 5 computer iTunes authorization limit. Damn Apple! I turned on my 15” Apple MacBook Pro and deauthorized it. I then went back to the HTPC and authorized it.

Now I was ready to purchase the movie. NOT! The American Express card number registered with the iTunes store was out-of-date. So I had to go get my card and update the information.

Finally, I was downloading the movie and I thought, “We’ll be watching this soon.” I was wrong. It took Apple 35 minutes to download a 898MB file. Unlike Amazon, Apple requires that the whole file be downloaded before you can begin watching and their servers run at a small fraction of the speed of Amazon’s. Amazon would have been done in a third of the time or less.

So over 2 hours later and after a lot of technology induced anger and frustration we finally got to watch The Nightmare Before Christmas. Of course Apple had just treated me to their technological version of a nightmare before Christmas.

So I am sending a big bah humbug to Apple and hoping Santa puts coal in Steve Job’s Christmas stocking.