If it's not one thing,...

...it's another. Last week, I went to defrag the hard drive (which I haven't done in gourds only know how long.) There wasn't enough free space to do so. In fact, the hard drive was a 20GB drive. My iPod is a 30GB. Not that I'm planning to fill it all up, but my teeny little iPod shouldn't have a bigger memory than my big ol' computer. So, new hard drive 'tis. First, I think "I can do this myself." Well, that lasted as long as it took me to get totally confused at futureshop.ca. So, we'll call in the professionals - Nerds On Site. Fine, they'll come Sunday afternoon. Sounds good - it'll take an hour, all will be well.

Well, it took ten hours. It started well - popped in a 40GB drive, hooked it up, partitioned it. Rebooted. Or not. It couldn't reboot - it was missing the file that told the drive what the hell it had on it. As Ron (the tech) put it, it was a "shower of shit." So, swap the drives around, making the 40 the main. (Which is probably a good thing, since the 20 is 4 years old, making it a doddering thing prone to croak at any time.) I find the reinstall disks, we re-set the system. He trolls the internet and finds a nifty program that recovers the old drive. It all gets copied to the new drive - turns out 90% is ancient crap - I caught snippets as they flew by and there were references to sites I haven't been to in years. Nevertheless, it's all got to copy, which takes HOURS. It finishes (at like quarter to 1 a.m.), Ron installs a spiffy set of USB 2.0 ports (which seem to be solving my iPod issues, which is great, since dad's went wonky this weekend) and finally gets to go home.

This leaves me with the task of sorting through all the stuff and pulling the data files that I need to. Which I do admirably, with one notable exception. Dad's iPod files. Combine that with the fact that his got fucked up this weekend? I spent hours pulling the stuff that I either knew was on there or that I was pretty sure he wanted. I still feel like a total ass, mind you.

So, no photos until I upload the photo software. I still need to go get all the damned plugins for stuff. I'm having to reconstruct the bookmarks list (I might have been able to pull it from the rubble, but it was easier to just delete the lot after I pulled the easily found and necessary data files.) Which is making me clean up the bookmarks list at least. Piles of work to do. Ippy.

It's late, I'm almost finished updating my iPod (I spent a lot of time in the computer room, so I examined Mom and Dad's collection. Odd, but full of interesting stuff - a Marilyn Monroe compilation, Simon and Garfunkel in Central Park and some other stuff.) More knitting-related posting later.