Wednesday, August 06, 2008

Sometimes, Wargames Feels Like A Documentary...

Okay, perhaps I am being a little bit dramatic there, but I swear that damn PC in my house runs my god-damned life, and right now, I would piss on the damn spark plug if I thought it would make any difference !!

Now, to be fair, it's actually not just the PC, it's that damned ITunes as well. Fucking ITunes. I love you and hate you at the same time, you hideous bitch goddess. this is the second time in the last, what 6 months that you have kicked me in the balls !

First time, it was a virus in the PC. And we had to wipe the hard drive and start over. Had the genius(me) backed up his ITunes ? Of course not, you silly rabbit, why would I have done that ? We had bought an external hard drive, and that was running a backup. Except, that for some reason, the backup had stopped being performed a few weeks earlier. And all of this would not have been so bad, except that I had started to load CD's onto ITunes to then sell the CDs. So, there was music that was on ITunes that I no longer had in my possession.

I found one of those programs that would allow me to salvage music from my actual IPod and copy it back onto my PC, so some of the music was saved(most notably all my Van Morrison, and my copy of Jerry Reed's "East Bound and Down"-the theme song from Smokey & the Bandit), and what was lost was not earth shattering.

I did learn my lesson, though. I Backed up my Itunes to DVD's(12 so far), and actually put the ITunes on the external hard drive. Pretty smart for a dumb guy, huh ?

Everything was going swimmingly, and then the other day, I opened up ITUNES, and this electronic voice says "Greeting, "Professor Falkan."...Kidding...But what DID happen was I tried to play a song, and I got the little exclamation mark icon next to the song, and a message telling me that(I'm paraphrasing) the song could not be played because the file could not be located.
Wha ?
Huh ?
Juh ?
I went to check the external hard drive. It wasn't in the My Computer folder. I checked under the desk, and the external hard drive was still physically in the room, it was just not being recognized by the computer(it was like a bad Lifetime movie). Well, after some choice swears leveled at the computer, Bill Gates, The New York Yankees(everything is always ultimately the New York Yankees fault, you all know that), and those "jerks at Best Buy who sold me this mother humping hard drive!", I fiddled with the ports, and the wires, and reunited the external hard drive and the PC. It will not be easy, but I think those two kids are gonna make it work.

One problem. ITunes was still refusing to recognize my music files.

"Fuck a duck!" I exclaimed.(and I actually did exclaim this, you can ask My Special Lady, I exclaim "Fuck a duck" quite a bit. I think it is just an alliterative swear, and not some sort of latent desire, but I would keep your waterfowl a safe distance, just in case.)

The good news was that I did not lose any music files. And after several failed attempts(including one that created doubles of a large number of my music files), I have finally figured out a way to rebuild my ITunes database. Unfortunately, that includes deleting everything, and then re-adding it to ITunes. Fun! Fun ! Fun !!!


Want to play a game ?

6 comments:

Lauren Matson said...

*smug Mac user*

Paticus said...

Lauren-Blah blah blah

Lauren Matson said...

:P

I gave up after having to replace my hard drive in my laptop while I was in London TWICE, in addition to my iPod breaking (Apple product - so it's all fair!). I still remember having to buy a dodgy used external hard drive at a place called CEX (for reals) to store all my music/photos/media files just so I didn't lose all my music while my backup CDs where 4000 miles away, or eradicate a year's worth of photographic memories of my year there.

As lovely as the digital age is, it's way too ephemeral. Seems a bit pointless, all the ease and compactness of it, if you have to have three digital copies and at least one hard copy just to keep from losing everything when a bit of code goes awry. Lots harder to lose an actual album of photographs or a wall of CDs.

I'm a pretty hardcore downloader, but even I've decided that the best & safest way to have a digital music collection is as copies of the physical CDs you purchase/steal. I mean, iTunes doesn't even let you actually own or do what you like with the 0's and 1's you just spent 9.99 smackeroos on, but that's a whole different rant!

Paticus said...

Lauren- yeah, we have backups backing up the backup-then put that on two different sets of discs!!
I have stopped selling anything that I have, but i still buy things from ITunes, it's just waaaay too convenient for a lazy ass like me.
And I really like being able to buy single songs.

Anonymous said...

Really, something is wrong with the system when you burn a CD to digital and then back-up the digital to CD or DVD. I've sworn several times that my next purchase will be a MAC. But I had to use a MAC book for 2 weeks at work and yikes, I'm an old dog that just can't learn new tricks. Those two weeks sucked. I might still merge a mini-mac and a secretly obtained copy of XP the next time I need a new system. Or keep the old system for physical firewall and the new one for secure storage (i.e., download, clean, transfer). Once I'm done with online school and not on the freakin' computer and freakin' internet all the freakin' time.

Paticus said...

sh- yeah, as cool as MACs look and are supposed to work, I still love the PC. And cars made of metal. And vinyl records. Man, I'm old-where are my slippers.
And hey, what are those kids doing in my yard !!! :)