As a final update to my recently reported computer woes: I got my computer back, complete with new hard-drive, but they weren't able to recover any of the remaining data on the old one. That included all my music files, Safari bookmarks, and all the archived email from my old email program.
Last night, using a third-party shareware hack, I was able to successfully pull all my music files off my iPod, including playlists (no small issue, as the idea of trying to reconstruct 147 playlists wasn't any fun). The program to do it cost me $40, which I figured would be worth every penny if it actually *worked*... and so it did, and so it was. (iPod.iTunes -- I could send a link to anyone interested.) That being the bargain, I can live with the loss of the bookmarks (fairly easily reconstructed) and the email archives (a pity, I did tend to dip into them looking for something particular once in a while, and there are things I'm sorry to have lost, but -- oh well).
Thanks to everyone for the good wishes and offer to help with the music; I'm so glad I didn't have to take anyone up on it! Apologies to anyone I owe a reply to; I'm slowly catching up with my backlog.
This morning when I woke up, it was to a catastrophic hard drive failure. *WAIL*! 1 hour with tech support, then 3 hours schlepping it in to the Apple store... which I discovered was a MADHOUSE due to this weekend being Tax Free Shopping in Mass... for which reason they had closed their service desk... and I fear I was a total bitch until I got them to look at it anyway, run diagnostics, run disk-fix, and give me back a computer that, thank god, actually works. (Because I spent the 45 minutes it took to do that pricing new computers... and I can't really afford a new one right now. Ugh.)
Tonight is for backing up like a big dog.
Here are my random thoughts on SciFi Friday (now, ETA the things I inevitably forgot):
Pursuant to my rant yesterday about confronting actors with slash, raqs has some thinky thoughts about that here, and, yes to everything she says. That's a great deal of what's at the heart of my objection to the practice, with some good analogies.
I think there was more stuff that I meant to say, but as usual it's leaked out of my brain because I didn't jot it down. Feh.
Going to pet my computer and try to make it behave. And to back it up.