Back in June, one of my computer's hard drives failed. The boot drive failed to boot. I was trying to figure out what to do to get my compy back in working order. Fortunately, I had a spare hard drive hanging out, so I made that be the boot drive, and all was mostly well. Until one day, another hard disk decided to crap out on me, this time wiping the file allocation tables on that drive clean. This drive was the one where all my documents were stored (I call this event The Catastrophic Data Failure of 2006). Fortunately, because of a heat-related problem with the drive earlier in the spring, I had bought a heatsink, and I had moved my entire iTunes library to another drive, which was proving to be more reliable at this point, and I had backed up my music library onto two DVD's. Unfortunately, that backup was rather old, dating back to the 13th of March. So I made a smart playlist on my iPod to list all the songs I had added since that last backup. Then I came to the problem I had seen on other blogs: restoring the metadata from the iPod. After months of fruitless searching, the hard disk on my iPod started to show signs of deterioration. The ultimate sign was this:
The dreaded folder icon. So I made every last-ditch attempt to get the metadata out of the iPod. Fortunately, it only appeared once, and that heat wave during which it appeared cooled off. I was able to make a PDF of my iPod's library, which would fit on 7 pages of A0 sized paper (841 × 1189 mm, 33.2 × 46.8 inches). The final blow came a couple of weeks ago, when I plugged the iPod into a Mac, and iTunes came up, and it basically deleted all of the song files on the iPod! Fortunately, it didn't touch the database, but seeing those gray (!) icons next to my songs was not a good sign. I copied the data into an Excel spreadsheet and went home, unhappy that my iPod was rendered a paperweight. Then, while searching on Google for scripts to solve my problem, I finally found a VBScript here (Despite what it says on the page, the script works outside of the QuicKeys application. QuicKeys only allows you to assign a hotkey to run this script, which I really didn't need. I used a command prompt. Run it any place you wish.) which would allow me to do what I wanted: adjust the play counts to what they were currently, not what they were according to the backed-up iTunes library. Of course, with over 1,800 songs in my library, this would surely be a daunting task. However, using the Excel spreadsheet, I was able to discover that only a few hundred needed to be changed. I spent a good part of a day fixing the problem, but I managed to correct them all. Then came the easier of the steps: restoring the iPod to factory settings and updating the iPod from the music library. It took a few attempts for me to do so, but I was able to complete it on Saturday night.
So anyway, back to today's adventure, or rather, the reason why I say my iPod is back to its "old self" is this: It was playing some songs on a playlist of my top rated songs in shuffle songs mode. It played an Eminem song called "Without Me," a clean version, but nonetheless Eminem being Eminem. There's a line in that song that mentions Moby. Anyways, after the song finishes, the next song the iPod plays is Porcelain, which was also used in Party Ben's mix of the Eminem song. It does that sometimes; playing one song, then playing another song that has some relation to the first.
Next thing. I saw this yesterday. I was arriving at Penn Station on the Long Island Rail Road. We came in on Track 16. Looking out a window, I could see that there were no trains on Tracks 17 or 18, but there was a train on Track 19. As I was going up the escalator up the concourse level, the announcer made an announcement. "The time is now 1:14, please stand clear of the closing train doors on Track 19. You have the All Aboard, Track 19. All Aboard!" (The signs adjacent to the stairways, which show the train's information, had already cleared by the time this announcement was made). Meanwhile, Track 17, where I saw no train, had a listing for a 7:00 AM train to West Side Yard (an employees only train; they never show a proper departure time for these trains, as trains to the yard come and go as trains from points east arrive at the station). As I'm walking onto the concourse, I see two people running across the concourse and down the stairs to Track 17. They were followed by a small family. A moment later, they all reappear at the top of the stairs, and I direct them to the stairs for Track 19. I doubt that they were able to catch their train, but who knows?
That's all for now. I think this post is long enough.
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