June 21, 2003
Man vs. Machine
As an early b-day present, my dad snagged me a 10 GB iPod on eBay. I was really stoked when it arrived in the mail yesterday. I thought I'd have it crammed full of music in an hour or so. Twelve hours later, I had it working. First, I discovered it wouldn't work with the FireWire port on my Audigy, so I had my sister run to Best Buy to get a FireWire card. Then I had to install the damn card, which isn't exactly easy when you have to verbally direct someone else who has never even cracked the case of a PC. After that, I hooked up the iPod to the new FireWire Card, only to have my system crash every time it detects the iPod. Now I'm mad. I poke around Usenet and then uninstall some software that might be the culprit behind the crashes. I reboot...
...Windows won't load. All I get is an arcane error message. I feel nauseous. I can't even access Safe Mode. I pull out my Windows XP CD. After some incantations, conjurations, the sacrifice of a small goat, and much gnashing of teeth, I manage to restore my system with pretty much everything intact. By this time, it's after midnight and I'm now on a personal vendetta against my iPod. No way am I letting some pretty little piece of plastic and silicon kick my ass. I reconnect it to the FireWire port.
It works. Within a few minutes, I have a couple gigs of MP3s loaded up. Victory is mine.
Thanks for the great product, Apple. But fuck your easy-to-use rep. And fuck your crappy MusicMatch software. Ephpod rules.
Posted by wintermute2_0 at June 21, 2003 12:14 PM