How Did I Get Here?

Quote of the Day: “The future will be better tomorrow.”

- Dan Quayle

Is it that I’m inconsistent and you have pretty much written me off or have I lost all my readers? It used to be I missed a day or two and I was inundated with emails asking if I was dead (which was funny because how would I answer if I was?)

Maybe you have just gotten used to it. Or I am writing to an empty audience. Criminy, this feels like C-SPAN.

Oh well, reap what we sow and all that jazz.

I got a lot to cover but I won’t go too far back and just get into recent rantings.

Favicons: I got in a funk the other day trying to get my Firefox browser to show the little icons on my favorites toolbar. That took up about an hour of time I’ll never get back.

Yes, I scoured the internet as I am prone to do and even added the add-on that is supposed to enable the user to reset or even set an individualized icon.

What was the result? The shit from jack.

I did find some instructions of how to go into the very DNA of my computer and change things at a molecular level but I thought, you know what … with my recent track record with Delzilla, let’s just leave well enough alone. It’s just icons. Little bastard fucker icons but icons nonetheless.

Haircut: as you know, I am not on active duty any more and that means I don’t have to get weekly haircuts. This means that I can let my hair grow but what you might not know is that I can’t just let it grow willy nilly.

Well, everything can pretty much go at it’s own pace (I’m looking at you, top, sides, and back), but there are two areas that need periodic grooming.

1. Right around the ears
2. Base of neck

These must be taken care of before the rest or for #1, you get these white trash blowback wisps over the top of the ear that make you look like you watch NASCAR. For #2, the carpet fuzz cotton ball spread just looks like baked ass.

Now combine all of that with the fact that I am an extreme cheapskate and cannot bring myself to pay $15 for a quick three-step zip zip zip and you get a dilemma.

So naturally I pressed my lovely wife into operating the barber-quality clippers I got way back in the early 90s when I tried to get by with cuts from the same wife. Seems my cheapassedness knows know time boundaries.

It was a major success and it’s amazing how a few strokes with clippers can improve your look so dramatically. As good as it gets at 40, I guess.

Two more vanity-slaughtering points I will point out for you, my faithful readers:

1. The sides are almost completely white and this bothers me more than I thought it would.

2. The top back is getting noticeably sparse. How could this happen? I’m half Mexican! I looked in a hand-held mirror and for the first time in my life, I found myself looking at my father’s head. I cried for an hour.

Running Squak: I decided that if I wait for the rain to subside, I would never get anything done so I geared up the other day and went running Squak. Although it poured on me the entire time, I wasn’t bothered. I mean, I had a running jacket on and I was in a rain forest. Within minutes I was as wet as I would get so no big deal.

Surprisingly, it took me longer to get up the mountain and longer to get down than it had the first time I did it, even though I felt I was going faster.

Also, this time I remembered Gu so I refueled at the top before basically falling down the mountain for 45 minutes.

It rocked.

Another moment of honesty here: I lost faith getting to the top. I was starting to bog and I let the wet get into my head. The last ½ mile is steep uphill and twisty so I kept thinking that the next turn was the top but was disappointed over and over again until I started cussing out loud.

Of course I got to the top shortly after this happened as these things tend to pan out.

iTunes: See, the other day I gave somewhat props to iTunes for saving my contacts and calendar when Delzilla took a dumpzilla and then what does it go and do? Reward by begrudged appreciation with the mother of all shit-in-my-open-mouth moves.

Just a second, I have to do this:

I hate you iTunes!
I hate you iTunes!
I hate you iTunes!
I hate you iTunes!
I hate you iTunes!
I hate you iTunes!
I hate you iTunes!
I hate you iTunes!
I hate you iTunes!
I hate you iTunes!
I hate you iTunes!
I EFFING hate you iTunes!

(you would think that makes me feel better … but …. let me check……nope.)

Here’s the deal. I noticed there were some exclamation point icons next to some of my songs in my iTunes library. Then I discovered that “some” was really about HALF!

What does that mean? Well, let me see if I can put this in easy terms.

The songs listed in my iTunes library are simply pointers to the actual files on my computer. I hate iTunes like Oprah hates rice cakes so I don’t dare let it even come close to touching any of my actual files.

Well, when the moons around the planet ShiTuno line up, it forgets where that pointer points to. The path somehow gets corrupted and then the exclamation icon says “Hey, I’m too much of a fucktard to remember where this song is.”

So what does it do? It skips it and goes to the next one.

“Hey Jason, doesn’t it let you point it in the right direction?”

Well, yes, it does but I have over 5000 songs and I don’t feel like going through 2500 songs and doing the 10-second procedure per song to pull iTunes thumb out of its dumb ass. That’s 7 hours of hate I’m not willing to go through at this time.

“OK, well, don’t you use Windows Media Player to listen to music and therefore a corrupted iTunes library wouldn’t matter, right?”

Well, sorta. You are right, I don’t use the iTunes player mostly because I think that CrApple is the blood-red shitstain on Satan’s heavy-flow panties. But what happens when I try to sync it with my iPod and iPhone?

It would be like Normandy in my office, folks.

I needed a plan. The first one was simple: have iTunes rescan my library and if it is intelligent enough, it will just fill in the missing paths when it finds them.

Yeah, right. We ARE talking CrApple here. You know what happened? This is so retarded I need to put it in it’s own paragraph so you can read it over and over:

It just slaps another full set into the library. Therefore I ended up with this:

2500 original good-path songs
2500 bad-path songs that don’t play
5000 new good-path songs

ARE YOU EFFING KIDDING ME, CRAPPLE?

Really, this is how your software works? And you wonder why I think you should have your combined testicles nailed with ball peen hammers?

I really had no choice at this point but to erase the whole damn thing and start over with a fresh set. It hurt but it had to be done.

You know what, fuck that, it DIDN’T need to be done but for some yet-to-be explained reason, my library ONCE AGAIN got corrupted and now it was going to cost me many frustrating hours of tedious work.

I hate you CrApple!

It probably had something to do with my hard drive going down but I reinstalled my entire music library exactly in the same manner, installed a freshly downloaded version of iTunes (spit!), and synced it with my iPhone. So I still don’t know why it all went to shit.

Why is this so irritating? Because ever since I got my iPhone, I have been FORCED to use this software I hate and have literally wasted DAYS doing the most tedious bullshit to make the program work for me.

Case in point, and the first of many time-suck-due-to-iShit-sucking-donkey: it has a tendency to list every song twice in the library. So I have to go through and delete every other copy of every song. I tried to get to the bottom of this but it is an illogical bug that defies all logic. The extra copies point to a file in a folder that is hidden within the structure of the real flies’ structure. I tried to delete it once and it erased not only the file copy but the original and I had to go to my archives to restore my mp3s.

I was sooooooooo pissed.

Moving on, yeah, I had to go through the entire library and erase half the entries because iShit sucks serious ass.

Once I got that done, I thought I was just about done but I had a new little cake of shit waiting for me. Happy effin’ birthday to me.

When I erased the library, it erased all my playlists.

Oh, the NAME of the playlist was still there but they were completely empty.

I just about lost my red-hot mind at this point.

After stopping myself from punching holes in every wall I could find… excuse me, just recounting this requires me to do something….

I hate you iTunes!
I hate you iTunes!
I hate you iTunes!
I hate you iTunes!
I hate you iTunes!
I hate you iTunes!
I hate you iTunes!
I hate you iTunes!
I hate you iTunes!
I hate you iTunes!
I hate you iTunes!
I EFFING hate you iTunes!

As I was saying, after stopping myself from punching holes in every wall I could find, I had a clear moment and looked through my shit-colored glasses:

If I sync my iPhone at this point, it will “copy” over the playlists from my computer to my iPhone and since the computer playlists are now empty (I hate you, iShit!), it will erase all my songs on my iPhone.

I actually picked up my iPhone and MOVED it to the other side of the room.

Ok, OK, OK, calm down. What can we do to fix this? What’s next, Grose?

Well, the playlists are complete on the iPhone so why can’t we just copy the list over to the computer? The newly copied files are in the same place on the computer so it should see them where it expects to see them? Why wouldn’t this work?

BECAUSE WE ARE TALKING ABOUT iShit, PEOPLE? HAVE YOU NOT READ A FUCKING WORD I’VE WRITTEN UP TO THIS POINT?

It turns out, I am not the first one to desire an iPhone to computer transfer but the assclowns at CrApple decided that this would be something useful and therefore made it about as easy as teaching my dog to fart Mozart to C flat.

I could take a chance on paying money I don’t have to get a program to do this.

Hey, maybe I have some back-up iShit file in my archives that would restore …. What? Punch myself in the nuts for even thinking that? After another 20 minutes of fruitless searching (either CrApple doesn’t have such a file or they hide it with a billion levels of secure scrambling and encoding that I’d sooner find Jesus’s baby teeth) and there was only one thing left to do.

I punched myself in the nuts.

Finally I found a free program called SharePod that did the trick but all it really did was pull copies of the songs onto the hard drive. Why did this not help me much?

I wanted the PLAYLISTS restored, not copies of the songs ON the playlists.

Think of it as wanting to recreate a box of chocolates. I don’t need you to dump all the various-shaped chocolates on my lap. I need the map on the lid to show me where they go.

So all this really did was give me a list of songs I had on the playlists.

It was at this point that I was too tired to fight any longer. I knew what had to happen. I would have to recreate all my playlists manually and try not to let the white-hot hatred consume me during the HOURS it would take to do this.

I started by opening the folder I got from SharePod which had all the songs on my iPhone. I would look at the first song (Here Without You by 3 Doors Down), click in my search box in iShit, type it in, find it, and drag it into the “Jason’s iPhone” playlist.

One down, 5000 to go.

I hate you, iShit.

When I’m done with that, I will sync it up with my iPhone and LOGICALLY, I will be back at the point I started with a week ago before iShit decided my library should have a Tabasco sauce enema.

But I know, I KNOW it will be a complete fucking disaster. Stay tuned.

You know what, it’s late and I didn’t expect that last one to take so long so I am going to post and try to hit the other half of this post tomorrow.

Hasta.

(note: this might be the most profane use of vulgarity on record for me. I apologize to those of you who changed my diapers 40 years ago.)

F.M.L. of the Day: “Today, I was out for a nice walk and saw a man being attacked by a large crowd. Instinctively I ran to help him. I pushed one “thug” off him and that little time allowed him to escape. I later found out the man I saved had just keyed someone’s car and they had intervened. Guess whose car. FML.”