I'm still at odds with the DVR. Don't think I'm gonna let it off the hook that easily. It still freezes, drops audio, cuts off, yada yada yada, and does all the things it's so adept at doing. I just have another device to bitch about:
My MacBook.
Wait? What's that? The almighty Apple creation is causing problems? The laptop that is supposedly immune to viruses, spyware, and adware? How could I possibly have an issue with it?
Well, it's me. Technology and I don't mix (well).
I've had my MacBook for a little over a year, and up until last Thursday, I've had no problems, whatsoever. I was in love with it. I had been a loyal PC user for 20 years, but had to suffer through problems and issues almost monthly. But with Apple? Nah...it was, dare I say, perfect.
The only "problem" I had with my laptop was that I didn't have a lot of music in my iTunes library. I refused to download Limewire or BitTorrent, not because I think it's wrong to share copy written files through the Internet, but because of my previous experiences with it (namely, crashing my computer due to viruses). I always wondered why artists and musicians had such an issue with their songs being leaked and downloaded on the Internet. It's more publicity for them, which means more money, right? At least, that's the way I see it. Maybe I'm just a cheap ass. Whatever the case, good music should be shared and not hidden.
Anyway, most of my songs came from either direct purchases on iTunes, which started to get expensive, CDs that I had uploaded, or blogs on the Internet that offered a free download. In total, I had a whopping 150 songs, or so, in my music library. Being the music enthusiast that I am, I needed to do something about that.
I had a video iPod, which had been giving me problems i.e. blasting the volume on its own causing my eardrums to bleed, but it had nearly 4,500 songs on it. I hated that I had to plug my iPod into my laptop just to hear all of those songs. I wished there was someway I could just put all the songs from my iPod onto my MacBook.
Alas, there is a way. It's called Senuti (iTunes backwards). It allows users to transfer songs from their mp3 player to their music library.
This was an even greater application for me because I had just purchased the new iPod Touch to replace the devil video iPod, and I didn't have songs to put into it because I didn't have any (in today's terms, the phrase "not having any songs" translates to "I have less than 1,000"). However, the iPod Touch requires one thing: download iTunes 8. (Why is this post sounding like one whole big Apple plug?)
So, there I was last Thursday - on my perfect Mac, downloading the perfect application, with an upgrade of the perfect music library...what could possibly go wrong?
Senuti downloaded just fine. I connected my iPod to start transferring all 4,500 songs. That process seemed, to me, well, like a long process. So I stepped away from the computer to do other things. I came back in about an hour, and I saw that little rainbow spinwheel (the equivalent of the hourglass on the PC, meaning it's trying to process something). I figured, "Oh, OK. It's just a lot of information. That thing should go away soon." So, I walked away again. I came back in another hour, and the spinwheel was still there. On top of that, the computer started making this clicking sound, as if it was going to explode or something. WTF? From now on, bear with me, as I get into some MacBook terminology.
I tried to close out of the application windows - nothing.
I tried to Force Quit all programs - nothing.
I tried control, apple, option, shift, [insert any other button] - nothing.
So, I turned off my computer. I turned it back on...and all I saw was a gray screen. I didn't see the Apple logo, nor did I see this little guy:
I repeated these steps about 20,000 times, but still nothing. It was just gray oblivion.
I couldn't believe it. After a year of bliss, the stupid computer wanted to do this to me? I logged onto our other computer (a PC! Gasp!), and I read some of the discussion forums to see if other people were having the same problems, too. And as it turned out, some of them were. And yanno what they say the problem was? iTunes 8. According to the Apple Forums, iTunes 8 apparently had been eating up people's hard drives and frying them. It did the same to mine. Stupid Apple!
I took it to the Apple store at 1:00pm Friday, and he said my hard drive was kaput. Well, no shit Sherlock, the operating system won't even run. He said it would take two days to fix. Fine. The worst part about losing my laptop for two days wasn't the fact that I would lose all my files. I had a flash drive with a lot of my documents, most of my pictures are on MySpace (ha!), and well, you know the whole music deal. The worst part was that I live in the East Bay, and I drove about 30 minutes away to San Francisco because that was the only Apple store that had an appointment for me. I figured, in two days, I'd be at work (Sunday) in San Francisco, and I'd just pick it up then. I drove home, and around 3:00pm, I got a phone call.
"Hello?"
"Hi, Jenna? This is Miriam from the Apple store. Your computer is done."
Are you frickin' kidding me? The inane part was that I contemplated going back to SF the second they called me, but my rational side kicked in telling me, "Gas is 3.83, and you're broke." So, I called them and told them I'd pick it up on Sunday like I had originally planned. Ironically, they said, "No problem." Easy for them to say; I've had plenty the past day and a half.
After this crazy debacle, there's an even sadder part that causes me to question if Apple is in cahoots with some secret brainwashing organization (let's just call them their marketing team, for now). Because Apple has a genius marketing team, I'm only one paycheck away from purchasing their newest operating system, Leopard.
Doesn't it look cool? And plus there's Time Machine on it, which is basically a System Restore (for you, PC heads). I'm such a sucker.
This whole adventure happened because all I wanted to do was take the music from my iPod and put it on my computer. That's it. A lot of my songs on my iPod came from my friends' libraries and earlier downloads from Limewire (on the PC). It was shared, and it was free. I like free stuff. I got to listen to music I wouldn't have otherwise heard, due to the eclectic range of all my friends. But, of course, because I have such bad luck with technology, it prevented me from doing it. Is this the digital rights management gods trying to send me a sign? Lars Ulrich, are you monitoring my computer habits?
Well, if it (he) is, I'm ignoring it because once I got my computer back, I downloaded iTunes 8 again, as well as Senuti.
Strangely enough, after analyzing all the things that caused my laptop to crash, I've deduced that it wasn't iTunes 8 or Senuti, especially since they're running perfectly now. It was trying to transfer 4,500+ files to a computer that was already trying to handle two new humongous applications at once.
My bad.
OK, Steve Jobs and Apple, you're off my sh*t list - for now.
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