iPod emergency

OK, I'm back in the hostel after a quick wander around town. It's not exactly pouring rain here, but it's definitely a steady shower. I've wandered around a park over in Buda (on the other side of the river) and climbed the hill there. Found a shallow little cave to hang out in during a particularly strong downfall.

I thought I'd tell the ipod story, since it really had me stressing out. Basically I noticed the symptoms of a dying hard drive starting up again the day I met Rico in TO. Most of you know that I had previously fixed just this problem by opening up the 'pod and putting a paper shim on the hard drive spindle. I figured that since it was starting up again, though, that there was no way I could fix it again. What would I do, put in a thicker shim? So, I asked Rico to drive me to an electronics store (ended up being future shop. lame eh?) I bought a new 80 gig video iPod, briefly felt like shit for spending that much money, and then set to the task of getting my music on it.

Now, let me make it clear that facing two months on the road, alone, with no music was not only a shitty prospect, it was into the 'unthinkable' realm. This is a project I was strongly committed to finishing, to say the least.

So, first thing: find a computer we can use. Rico hasn't moved his from his old place yet, and even so it's really old and has USB1.0. That would pretty much make it impossible to move all 30 gigs of my tunes. Instead, Rico said I could use Morgan's computer, even though Morgan wasn't home to approve it. I figured that this meant I should find a way that didn't involve installing software.

So, the process: plug the old ipod into the machine. Error, cannot read. Shit! Plug it into the USB port on the keyboard: error, USB hub does not have the power required to run device. Uh oh, i'm starting to freak out. Finally I crawled under the desk, moved a few things around and plugged it directly into the back of the machine. -pause- Sucess! It mounts as a new drive.
OK, this is the part where I'm glad I know my way around a PC. I went into the hidden folders on the ipod drive, found all the music files (they're just numbered mp3 files on the ipod) and then started a huge file copy to the PC. This ran for about 40 minutes, so Rico and I went for a cruise on the boardwalk at the beach. Nice.

Get back and the copy is done. I figured out how to launch iTunes using a new, empty library and then imported all the mp3s that I had copied. It ignored the numbered file names and pulled all the info from the id3 tags, just like I hoped. Again, success! Finally I plugged the iPod in, formatted it and then started the sync. This also took a while, so we went for late lunch-early dinner. Got back, and bingo: new ipod, same music! I recreated a few of the 'word find' playlists that Matt had suggested and we were off.

Crazy eh? At first I was pissed that it happened, but later I realized that it could have happened 24 hours later and I would have been totally screwed. So, in that way, it was perfect.