The day the music died
Are you completely exhausted by my adventures with electronics lately? You may want to pass this post over, then. Apparently my electronics are sick of me, too. Or maybe there were sunspots yesterday that disturbed the electromagnetic spectrum. Or maybe I've just exceeded my place on the techno-savvy spectrum, and this is the way that the universe busts my britches.
My iPod died last night. It's been a stellar two and a half weeks, and each day I found new ways to love the little dickens, but it's all over now but the crying. I don't know what happened. I downloaded two songs off iTunes and transferred those plus three songs that Beloved had ripped from our CD collection back when he gave me my original MP3 player last year onto the iPod. I got a funny message from the system tray of Windows XP, and started fiddling with things. (cue ominous music) At one point, I decided I should just take everything off the iPod and start all over again, but even though I deleted everything it was still showing the memory as in use.
Eventually, I made my way to apple.com's iPod support pages, and I tried their 5R approach to troubleshooting. I installed the iPod updater twice, reinstalled the iTunes software at least once, maybe three times (things got a little fuzzy after I was up past my bedtime) and restarted the computer at least four times. I got at least five different types of error messages in different platforms, but the bottom line was that something in the iPod itself was corrupt. By the time I was done, I wasn't getting the funny message from the system tray anymore - but iTunes wasn't recognizing the iPod anymore either.
My iPod has been disowned by its peeps. And it's so deeply in mourning that it won't speak to them or me. Poor little "Escape Pod" gave me nothing but joy, and it had to end like this - it's nothing short of tragic.
I finally gave up and went to bed and turned tech support over to Beloved. He fiddled with it for another couple of hours, and this morning I figured all would be right with the world again. Au contraire - it seems over the course of the night, my iPod gave up the will to live entirely. Despite being almost fully charged, and being plugged into the laptop for the better part of five hours last night, it ran out of power and died a lonely death sometime around midnight. Thank electra for the extended warranty program.
And that fancy-ass Nokia phone I've been going on about? It went on strike last night, too. I was trying to key a few names and numbers into the contacts folder, and the keypad started behaving randomly. You know how the number pad keyboard works, where you click the number a few times in rapid succession to get the letter you want? It started giving me random letters from each number, sometimes starting with the second or third letter on each number and sometimes giving me random strings of letters. If I pressed 333 quickly, sometimes I'd get a D, sometimes I'd get FFE, sometimes I'd get DEF, sometimes just an E. No idea why. Sometimes it would stop at four letters and give me a ? and not let me type any more characters. Random confusion.
So today I'm going out to Grand and Toy and buying myself a nice gel roller pen to go with the pretty little notebook with handmade paper that my mom gave me last week. Maybe I should make that a quill and ink, just so the universe sees that I'm truly penitent for my unapproved forays into the land of technology. And hosting my own blog? You never heard that from me. If the universe isn't satisfied with my contrition, it may come down to writing my posts with an eyebrow pencil after all.
P.S. I guess Blogger was listening. Even though I damn well know better by now, I clicked "publish post" without copying or saving this post - and got a 404 message. Luckily, it was still here when I pressed the 'back' button.
I prostrate myself in repentance, gods of technology. I apologize for having offended thee. I'm not worthy.
Edited to add: at least I'm not the only one with techno-woes. Maybe it's contagious?
My iPod died last night. It's been a stellar two and a half weeks, and each day I found new ways to love the little dickens, but it's all over now but the crying. I don't know what happened. I downloaded two songs off iTunes and transferred those plus three songs that Beloved had ripped from our CD collection back when he gave me my original MP3 player last year onto the iPod. I got a funny message from the system tray of Windows XP, and started fiddling with things. (cue ominous music) At one point, I decided I should just take everything off the iPod and start all over again, but even though I deleted everything it was still showing the memory as in use.
Eventually, I made my way to apple.com's iPod support pages, and I tried their 5R approach to troubleshooting. I installed the iPod updater twice, reinstalled the iTunes software at least once, maybe three times (things got a little fuzzy after I was up past my bedtime) and restarted the computer at least four times. I got at least five different types of error messages in different platforms, but the bottom line was that something in the iPod itself was corrupt. By the time I was done, I wasn't getting the funny message from the system tray anymore - but iTunes wasn't recognizing the iPod anymore either.
My iPod has been disowned by its peeps. And it's so deeply in mourning that it won't speak to them or me. Poor little "Escape Pod" gave me nothing but joy, and it had to end like this - it's nothing short of tragic.
I finally gave up and went to bed and turned tech support over to Beloved. He fiddled with it for another couple of hours, and this morning I figured all would be right with the world again. Au contraire - it seems over the course of the night, my iPod gave up the will to live entirely. Despite being almost fully charged, and being plugged into the laptop for the better part of five hours last night, it ran out of power and died a lonely death sometime around midnight. Thank electra for the extended warranty program.
And that fancy-ass Nokia phone I've been going on about? It went on strike last night, too. I was trying to key a few names and numbers into the contacts folder, and the keypad started behaving randomly. You know how the number pad keyboard works, where you click the number a few times in rapid succession to get the letter you want? It started giving me random letters from each number, sometimes starting with the second or third letter on each number and sometimes giving me random strings of letters. If I pressed 333 quickly, sometimes I'd get a D, sometimes I'd get FFE, sometimes I'd get DEF, sometimes just an E. No idea why. Sometimes it would stop at four letters and give me a ? and not let me type any more characters. Random confusion.
So today I'm going out to Grand and Toy and buying myself a nice gel roller pen to go with the pretty little notebook with handmade paper that my mom gave me last week. Maybe I should make that a quill and ink, just so the universe sees that I'm truly penitent for my unapproved forays into the land of technology. And hosting my own blog? You never heard that from me. If the universe isn't satisfied with my contrition, it may come down to writing my posts with an eyebrow pencil after all.
P.S. I guess Blogger was listening. Even though I damn well know better by now, I clicked "publish post" without copying or saving this post - and got a 404 message. Luckily, it was still here when I pressed the 'back' button.
I prostrate myself in repentance, gods of technology. I apologize for having offended thee. I'm not worthy.
Edited to add: at least I'm not the only one with techno-woes. Maybe it's contagious?
Said DaniGirl at 7:10 a.m. #
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