Somebody Must Be Fucking With Me

Okay, more drama in the Seth-kills-technology department.

Last night as I tried to drift off to sleep, soothed by the gentle tones of the BBC Newspod on my iPod, same said iPod did some shit I’ve never seen before. First it claimed to have no battery power and suggested, nay demanded that I connect it to a power source. That’s not new. I turn it off and back on, and it realizes that it has a decent charge and gets its happy ass back in the game. So I turn it off, only it doesn’t come back on. So I do the manual reset, like I’ve done a dozen times before. And nothing happens. Strange.

I turn on the light and look at the screen, and I see a giant check mark on the screen. What the fuck? It says “Disk Mode” at the top, and claims that it is okay for me to disconnect it. Disconnect it from what? I don’t know. But, the thing won’t turn on, won’t reset, won’t do a damn thing. So I get onto the Internet and find out what’s going on. Apparently you can put your iPod into Disk Mode, for what reason I know not. Getting it back was somewhat trickier. It wasn’t supposed to be tricky, but all the advice I was finding had assumed that a person put the iPod into Disk Mode manually. Not helpful. I found a few message boards where this problem had been addressed. One of the folks in my position threw his iPod against the wall, at which point it started working again. I shit you not. I must admit that I thought very seriously about following suit, but opted instead to “Restore” it, as others had suggested. “Restore” means reset the motherfucker to its factory settings by erasing it and starting over. This was fine with me, since I had already backed up everything last week when I recovered my music manually, and I knew I had the contents backed up nicely. So, I erased BOBCAT (my iPod), and started the process of dumping all the songs back into place. This was at 3:50 in the morning, so I set the files to copy and went to bed.

Yeah.

When I woke up, everything was right with the world. Even more so when I discovered that iTunes was now home to “24” and “The Shield.” Fuck yeah. So I downloaded 12, that’s right TWELVE, episodes of “24” with the intention of finally getting caught up on this season. When I finally got around to watching them tonight, some really interesting shit happened. And by “really interesting,” I of course mean “monkey rage inducing.” As I watched Jack Bauer do his thing in episode 15, iTunes started functioning in a way that is quite “mal.” First it froze, then it quit unexpectedly. I reopened it, and it closed again after about a minute. Then when I reopened iTunes, it made me agree to the license agreement again, as though I had just installed it. What the fuck? Then it froze up, and I closed it. When I reopened iTunes AGAIN, I noticed that it would no longer play anything. It just acted like I didn’t press play when I quite clearly did. So, I restarted it. And then I noticed that my hard drive, nine days out of the box, was no longer showing up. What? What the fuck?! WHAT THE FUCK!?

Mother. Fucking. Monkey. Rage.

So, I tried to use Disk Utility to find and fix the problem, but it kept freezing up. FUCKING DISK UTILITY?! That’s not supposed to happen. And I tried my new hard drive on my PC, which at least recognized that something was attached, claimed it was installed and ready to use, but never showed the drive. Neat. When I reattached it to my iBook, it showed up (Yeah!) but was now named BTTERSTIBK (What the fuck?) and all the files and folders had fucked up names (FUCK! FUCK! FUCK!), and now it’s not showing up at all. I’m running a virus check, just in case. But I can’t help feeling that Jack Bauer has somehow sabotaged my computer. If that’s the case, I will kill him. I will kill him with the power of my monkey rage.

[late edit: BestBuy gave me a new hard drive, so I guess Jack is in the clear. In honor of my murderous simeon proclivities, however, there are now shirts available at cafepress.com I thought the base prices were high enough, so there's no markup, so I'm not making any money. So what. I think I'll buy one myself.]