Just took a quick trip into Center City to replenish some essentials (rolled oats, oat bran, cashew butts; extra large farm fresh brown eggs from Esh's at the Reading Terminal, etc.) and have lunch at my favorite vegetarian Indian restaurant (Samosa on Walnut near 12th; all you can eat lunch buffet for 5.84; no, I'm not a vegetarian but that doesn't mean I can't enjoy their food from time to time).
I timed my return trip pretty well, arriving at Septa's regional rail station below the Gallery about three minutes before the train, and decided to fire up my iPod for the journey home. Except that my two-year-old iPod, which has never given me even a moment of trouble and which had been working flawlessly during the bus ride into Center City just two hours earlier, stubbornly refused to start. And in front of all those people in the station! I hid my humiliation by smiling and carelessly bobbing my head while tapping my toes to the strains of some unheard sweet melodies.
When I got home, I first tried to confirm if the iPod was really dead by plugging it into the firewire cable. No go. It just lay there, with nary a peep.
So I went to Amazon to search for a replacement, all the while grumbling under my breath about how I had been counting on its lasting at least one more year... Well, I decided I might as well spring for the $399 40GB model, especially since I have a $150 rebate certificate on its way from Amazon (in appreciation for all those external hard disks I bought last month).
Having settled the succession question, I decided to explore other options. Like maybe just getting a replacement battery. After exploring Apple's web site, I discovered some interesting things. If the iPod is more than one year old (and thus out of warranty) and the only thing wrong with it is a dead battery, Apple will replace the entire unit for a fee of $99 plus 6.95 shipping. (I know that one can buy batteries from third party sites for considerably less, but then one has to install them oneself. No thanks.) That looked like an interesting alternative.
Apple even provides a check list to make sure that the problem is a dead battery. One of the items on the checklist is "Resetting iPod if it appears frozen or doesn't respond."
Resetting the iPod? Hmmm. Who knew?
While the instructions are slightly different depending on the model, in my case all I had to do was
Press and hold the Play/Pause and Menu buttons until the Apple/iPod logo appears, about 6 to 10 seconds. You may need to repeat this step.
Actually, no, I didn't have to repeat that step. Within six seconds my beloved iPod had sprung to life like a Phoenix rising from the ashes (sorry for the cliché, but I felt a simile was called for and I'm fresh out of original ones).
I wonder how many other iPod owners needlessly replace their batteries when a simple reset is all that's needed to restore an apparently dead iPod to glowing life?
I've come across an extremely annoying bug in iTunes that cost me over an hour of my time this morning.
To back up my iTunes music library I use a Smart playlist that automatically grabs any new music that I add. It's defined as "Date added is after [date]". At some point I back up that playlist to DVDs using the burn playlist to disc feature (which can handle backing up to multiple discs), and then reset the date in the Smart playlist definition. Simple and effective.
Except today after I had burned two DVDs, iTunes balked on the third one with an error message to the effect that there was an invalid filename. But it didn't give me any indication of which track had the invalid name or what was wrong with it.
After following a few false leads I found the problem. There is a limit of 255 characters to filenames on a DVD. When iTunes burns a track to DVD it uses the track name and prepends a sequential number to it to create the filename on the disc. Thus, a track named "1. Allegro Energico" will end up on DVD as "001 1. Allegro Energico" (assuming it's the first track on that DVD). This is a simple way to make certain that there will be no duplicate filenames. Now iTunes enforces a 255 character limit on the length of a track name. The problem occurs when a track name is at or near that 255 character limit; when it tries to prepend the sequential number, the name is now longer than the 255 character limit.
So why would I have a track with such a long name? Some CDs split an individual work into multiple tracks (like the Richard Strauss tone poem Don Quixote, for example). When I import those tracks into iTunes, I tell it to join them together so that during playback there won't be jarring pauses in the middle of the music. The problem is that iTunes then names the ensuing joined track by concatenating the names of all the component pieces.
Note to self: remember to shorten the track name when joining tracks.
Reading through Paul Boller's Presidential Campaigns, a highly readable history of all the American presidential campaigns from George Washington through the current incompetent incumbent, I was brought up short by his claim that Henry Clay's most famous utterance was made in 1850, not during the 1844 election campaign.
Moreover, he gets the quote wrong. It's not "I would rather be right than be President" as Boller has it, but "I had rather be right than be president." And, according to Robert Remini's excellent biography, Henry Clay: Statesman for the Union, it was first uttered neither in 1850 nor in 1844, but in 1839.
Boller's book was first published in 1984, and he was relying on a 1915 biography of Clay, so the mistake is understandable. However, there's no excuse for not fixing it in subsequent editions now that Remini's work is available.