Fiddling with my Computers

This weekend while in Vancouver for the Army Reserves, I was working on my personal computer. I had already spent several hours on my own formulating a spreadsheet in Excel and getting our unit up-to-date for the first time in over a decade, when tragedy struck. Don't worry, nothing happend to my file... but when I popped in a CD to make a backup at the request of our Unit Administrator, it start making this horrible clicking sound. Immediately I figured it was my computer's fault--after all, the panel on the end of my CD-ROM is broken and only connected in one of the two spots it should be--but I also thought it might be the disc's format.

I was wrong.

It was confirmed today when I tried to put my Fiddler on the Roof Soundtrack into iTunes. My computer still reads CDs just fine; it just is no longer capable of transferring data on to the harddrive. Some quick thinking got the CD ripped onto my PC's Window's Media Center, and from there, onto a thumbdrive, though not before a temporary longing for a Mac because the whole process would have been user-friendly and not like pulling teeth, like any media is for Windows. Don't worry, I recognized the error in my ways and stopped longing for the Mac within seconds, though I was still annoyed with Windows, as improved as Windows 7 might be. Anyways, a long story short, I used the thumbdrive to get it to the laptop and on to iTunes in a very long way around what is supposed to be a simple task. At least my iPod is updated now--I had lost the cord and misplaced my iPod, so needless to say, it had been a while. It is nice, though. Now I can listen to songs from somewhat of a tragic musical which can remind me of a sad plot involving a ruined wedding party, choosing between home and love, choosing between family and a lover, and losing a home altogether. Fitting title, considering my dad used to always play the world's smallest violin in a sweet song of sorrow when I didn't get my way. Pretty upbeat, huh? I think so. 

iWant my iPod and iTunes to just iWork

I am starting to go crazy.

I love my iPod (though were I rich, I would have a new one without scratches on the screen), and I love my iTunes. The problem is that my iTunes stopped working, leaving me with an iPod that I can't update. At first I thought it was not the end of the world; I have some retrieval software which takes music from the iPod and imports it into iTunes. I used it when my computer crashed a year or so ago, and thus prevented the great tragedy of losing ALL of my songs which I have in digital copies only.

This time, my computer didn't crash. I just went to open iTunes, and it didn't open. I unistalled it, and then I tried to redownload it, hoping that was the problem. It didn't work. It also didn't work on my external harddrive. I haven't yet given up hope though-- I can still try to do it on the external harddrive through Deanna's clunker of a laptop, but who knows when that will happen. Let's face it-- it takes forever to boot up, and I am lazy and would rather spend hours trying to find a way to work around something that sounds like such an unattractive option. That is just my personality; I like to work hard to prevent having to do work of a lesser scale.

We'll see what happens, but in the meantime, my new music is limited to my car stereo, and if I ever use my iPod, it continues to be the same old selection without hope of ever updating.