buyer's remorse, the punchline

The punchline to yesterday's post is that even after going through the inconvenience of wiping the hard drive totally clean, and fretting for most of the day about how / whether I would be able to restore my data and applications, the computer is still crashing when I try to boot it, nine times out of ten.

This would seem to definitively identify the problem as a hardware-related one, which I guess will need fixing in 2006. I leave for the East Coast tomorrow and I don't think I'll be bringing the laptop with me.

Thursday, December 15, 2005
10:46 AM
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buyer's remorse

I bought an iBook G4 about a year and a half ago, and I find that I still regret not buying a PC laptop, nearly every single day. I can't think of a single thing that this Mac does better than a PC: it's only given me a half-dozen inconveniences that I have to circumvent with clumsy workarounds. None of that is particularly rant-worthy in and of itself, but there are technical problems of a whole other order that I've been struggling with lately. (People who maybe didn't come here to hear me complain in detail about a fairly technical problem might want to tune out right about now.)

Shortly after I bought the G4, it began crashing, usually during booting or in the first few minutes of use. I tried various "fixes" including Disk Utility, Archive + Install, the hardware test, deleting preferences, uninstalling different drivers, etc., but nothing seemed to work. Eventually the problem somehow corrected itself and life went on as normal.

Recently, though, the problem has come back, worse than before-- sometimes it'll take me 10, 20 tries to get the computer to boot successfully. I brought it into the Apple Store, and they said "do Archive + Install." I did that before and it didn't solve the problem, and I told them as much, but they urged me to do it again. So I did, but the problem still remains.

To me, the "last resort" was to erase the hard drive and start over fresh. This will require some tedious backing-up and a lot of tracking down application installation discs and serial numbers, ultimately a small price to pay for a computer that doesn't cost me an hour of my life every time I want to turn it on. The last sticking point was the problem of how to back up the precious, precious metadata in the iTunes Music Library.

The good folks at the Apple Store told me that I could back up the whole iTunes Music Library on an external drive and that this data would be preserved (provided that I also preserve the .xml file, the file where the play-count and ratings data is actually stored). OK, no problem: but now that I've gone to the trouble to wipe the whole hard drive I can't figure out how to *restore* the library from that backup.

This page suggests that copying the entire directory and dropping it in my new Music directory should work, but no, iTunes just sits there blithely, insisting that the library is empty. What gives?

Any suggestions you might have, gentle reader, would be greatly appreciated. I'm hoping to avoid having to resort to a third-party program like CopyPod, although I have to admit it's looking pretty tempting right about now.

Labels: personal

Wednesday, December 14, 2005
6:34 PM
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reading, talking

I should know never to type phrases like "Expect a write-up here over the weekend, or Monday at the latest" into Blogger, because they never come true. Predictably, I gave up on Friday's poetry reading because we'd had a fairly substantial snowfall the night before, and the subsequent street-plowing had half-buried the car in a bank of gritty municipal slush. The prospect of digging the car out only to return an hour or two later to find "my" spot "stolen" by some other driver couldn't really compete against the prospect of sitting at home, drinking cocoa, and watching Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. Does this make me a bad person?

So, in substitution for a poetry write-up, I'd instead like to point your attention to this great talk by cartoonist / visionary Jim Woodring. It is practically a poem, ripe with fabulous phrases like "It can be difficult to resist the bizarre allure of furniture that is not ours" or "that one yellow leg was as perfect as a column of poured paint."

The talk is "about" something but I'm not entirely sure what. It could be "prayer, knowledge, and biology." It could be "design, capitalism, and madness." People who are familiar with Woodring's work shouldn't really be surprised to find all these things melting together until they form a single cryptic concept.

Postscript: While writing this post, I stared at this for a while.

Labels: personal

Monday, December 12, 2005
12:16 PM
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linkfarm XXXI

1. Deliciously intricate non-electronic task management system

2. Grim piece on the falling status of knowledge and expertise in America

3. The Institute for Figuring

4. Abandoned buildings around Philly

5. Abandoned buildings around Detroit

6. Family Circus cartoons with H.P. Lovecraft captions

7. The fifteen wealthiest fictional characters (according to Forbes)

8. Pool of texture photos

9. Annotated links accompanying the new Norton Anthology of Children's Literature

10. Great Steven Shaviro reviews of Hal Hartley's Girl From Monday and Charles Strosser's "outrageously manic" SF novel Accelerando

Thanks to Angela (#7) and Boing Boing (#6)

Labels: linkfarms

Friday, December 09, 2005
12:08 PM
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Detroit Snowfall
Originally uploaded by jbushnell.

phototrawling

I went to Michigan this past weekend, and spent part of one day walking around taking photos. I was so cold that a lot of my pics turned out blurry as a result of my shaking hands, but I put some of the ones that turned out well up at Flickr.

Tomorrow night: December's Discrete Series reading, Elizabeth Block + Jordan Stempleman, at the Spare Room. Expect a write-up here over the weekend, or Monday at the latest.

Thursday, December 08, 2005
10:03 AM
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kraken / archon

Forgive the lack of recent posting: it's the final week of the semester and everything's crushed together and overlapped, as usual. So, quickly then, here's the news:

1. You can see an annotated photo of what I ate for Thanksgiving over at Flickr

2. Chicago-area readers may want to note that my band, Number None, will be playing this Saturday, Dec. 3rd, at Hotti Biscotti (3545 W. Fullerton). We'll be opening for Zelienople, and the show is free.

3. Rebis is now accepting pre-orders for Damp and Damned, a cassette-only release from Belgium's Sloow Tapes label. The two pieces on this tape are the result of a postal collaboration between Number None and Medroxy Progestone Acetate, aka the hermetic D. Bauler. DB took two tracks from Nervous Climates, (one of which, "Polar Kraken," you can now download as an MP3) and submitted them to a sequence of mystery re-recording techniques, returning them to us in a radically reworked form. We then dissected and reconstructed his reworkings until we had this 60-minute tape. The tapes come with a hand-cut "kraken" insert which is pretty cool. I'm not sure exactly how many of these we'll be getting, but to say that this run is going to be "limited" is, uh, probably accurate.

Labels: number_none

Thursday, December 01, 2005
3:07 PM
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