The saga continues, unfortunately, but does seem to shed light on the problem.

Despite my initial distrust of RealPlayer, I installed the plug-in in order to access some media that was locked in. Naturally, when I next plugged in my ipod, I was prompted to let RealPlayer manage it for me. Since I’ve been staying away from iTunes lately, I let it. I find the interface for RealPlayer to be offensive, but wanted to see how it functioned. I tried deleting some old podcasts, opening the door to disaster. The response from RealPlayer was that it was unable to complete the operation and, in the process, it managed to destroy all my playlists.

While I’d normally rant on software that can leave hardware in a permanently inconsistent state, I don’t think this was actually the fault of RealPlayer. Not completely. I’ve noticed that, from time to time, the ipod fails to go to sleep. When this happens, the play history for that session is also lost. My guess is that the OS expects to sync the drive before going to sleep. In light of some possible drive failure, sleeping is postponed (often draining the battery, if not noticed).

Extrapolate back to RealPlayer. A drive failure may have resulted in the software being unable to rewrite the iTunes database back to the ipod, leading to data loss. Blame the software or the hardware? Guessing again, I’d probably go with 20/80%.

I’ve since rebuilt the important playlists using GtkPod. Things are working again, but nobody trusts ZombiPod. Surgery may still be required to transmogrify ZombiPod to FrankenPod…

I’ve had better coffee and much better service. When my trim flat white arrived, it had been spilled all over the saucer that the cup had ridden upon. My friend had ordered a hot chocolate, which was delivered with a pair of marshmallows and a pineapple lump. She took the chocolate and offered me a marshmallow. Thinking that it might absorb some of the spilled coffee, I proceeded to dunk into the saucer.

The taste was surprisingly good. It’s a decent safety net for bad coffee.

It’s alive!!

After searching around on general info on iPod repair, I noticed that a lot of people mentioned loose cables being a big culprit. Looks like the same for me. I pried the case open with a screwdriver and a guitar pick and reseated the hard drive cable.

So far, everything seems to work. How long this will last is a mystery, though. It could crater tomorrow or next year. In the meantime, absolutely everything will be backed up to more stable storage.

It’s dead, Jim.

I was on the bus when it happened. I was listening to Scanalyzer at the time. All of a sudden, there was only the silence of the diesel bus running itself down the hill. The track position indicators had stopped moving, but there were still active controls. Within a moment, even that had stopped. Failure was complete.

Holding select and menu force a reboot of the device. Sad iPod icon.

The first question: replacement or repair. If replacement, the second question: with what? I really should try to have it repaired. I’ve got all my music on my computer anyway, so nothing important was lost. I’m a CD junkie, not an iTunes junkie, so I don’t have a truckload of DRM‘d music that only existed on my iPod.

I guess this is only the first part of a journey. I need my music player back, but I hate being dependent on gadgets. Oh, the conundrum.

I was brewing some coffee, meant as a light drizzle over some vanilla bean ice cream. A great idea, but reality pushed its way through. My coffee maker is a stove-top espresso maker; it’s aluminum, stands about 20cm high and has an octagonal base. My stove has gas burners, with 4 arms to stand things on. There is very little overlap between the element stand over the burner and the base of the coffee maker. Today, which is the second time I’ve had this happen, the coffee maker fell off the stove just after boiling. While I managed to avoid getting burned, I think I hurt my voice yelling swear words.

The problem is obviously the precarious nature by which the coffee maker rests on the stove. Wellington is prone to earthquakes, so I can’t really trust things to stay put, within millimetre accuracy. Time to shop for a solution. It’s not something overly complex; it only needs to effectively widen the overlap between surfaces. Imagine cross-hairs. Simple – so long as the weld at the joints doesn’t degrade in the heat over time. Maybe a spiral would be better. We’ll see what I find in the shops tomorrow. I can’t be the only person to have his coffee jump at him.

While waiting for the bus this morning, I noticed something odd about Kiwi drivers: they think that hazard lights are a park-anywhere permit. I happened to be near a dairy at the time and the nearest available parking spot that I could see was about 50m down the road; it was raining. The first car stopped on the road, blocking in the car that was legally parked at the curb, turned on the hazard lights and ran into the dairy for about 5 minutes. Just after she left, a man in another car parked up on the footpath – taking great care to ensure that his driver’s-side tires were within the no parking demarcations on the road – and ran over towards the dairy after engaging his hazard lights.

I don’t get it. Are hazard lights there as an apology to other drivers and to pedestrians for the obstruction? Or is it for parking wardens, so that they don’t get a fine for parking illegally? For whatever reason, it seems to work. Couriers do it constantly, taxi drivers, too. Even regular Joe’s will think nothing of flipping on the hazard lights, while stopped in a bus lane, to pick up and drop off people and/or stuff.

One can interpret this in a number of ways. Two that spring to mind are: there are too few parking spots available in several places in the city; and it is a symptom of the all-out arrogance of drivers in this country.

I certainly don’t think there is any actual shortage of parking…

For the first time since getting contacts, I forgot to take them out before going to sleep. I’m not sure if that’s why I woke up in the middle of the night, eyes watering, but it’s a decent explanation. It was certainly not the most pleasant experience, especially when it came to taking them out. At least the memory is firmly etched on my eyeballs now – maybe even literally.

Good people are often hard to find – good flatmates, usually harder. One of the girls in my house is leaving us in a couple weeks to a warmer flat, closer to town¹. She came to us after interviewing over a dozen people for the room back in November. It was a daunting task at the time and I’m not keen to do it all over again, especially on short notice. One can only hope that there are some suitably fantastic people looking for a flat in the middle of winter.

So, along with the joint birthday party that we’re hosting next weekend, it’ll kinda also be a going-off for Sarah. Costumes are still required…

¹ Our house has been fucking cold; it doesn’t winter well at all. I can’t blame her, all things considered. It actually kinda makes me want to be in a house that doesn’t require both a heater and a dehumidifier running so that we can dry our clothes.

This is more for those at home, and timed as such. Fire up the BBQs and keep celebrating the long weekend. Happy 140th…