Technical Difficulties

I am a person who needs noise when I am trying to concentrate.  I’m not sure why this is.  I like the idea of a nice, quiet space to work…but in reality, quiet = distraction.  When I write, I prefer to be in a busy restaurant or coffee shop with lots of conversations and music in the background.  Since my new office is super-quiet, I have turned to my iPod to save the day. 

I’ve seen all the commercials…anything made my Apple is cool and “just works,” while anything Intel-based sucks and emanates the scent of Old Spice.  Unfortunately I have to combine the two.  I use iTunes on a Vista Ultimate PC with my iPod mini.  My iPod seemed buggy so I decided to format it and start over.  While I was formatting, my computer informed me that I needed to get some very important updates for iTunes, so I downloaded those too.  

That was the beginning of a really annoying chain of events.  In order to finish reformatting, I had to plug the iPod into the wall.  Imagine the simplicity:  just plug it into the wall (??) to finish the job.  Problem was I left my iPod charger at work.  I didn’t think I would need the charger to do the simple task of formatting the gadget.  So this morning I brought my laptop to work, so all the necessary equipment would be present to get my music playing.  Then I plugged in the iPod (to finish reformatting) and was looking forward to my required noise.

Imagine my surprise when my iPod was suddenly French.  I could now select “Musique” if I wanted to…but I just formatted it, so there was no Musique to be heard.  I struggled through the French menus until I located “Langue” and then I selected “Anglaise.”  I was able to read my iPod just in time to see that suddenly all my songs were “not authorized” to play on my computer.  Something in the PC update wasn’t happy, I guess.  I finally managed to convince iTunes that half of my music was actually my music, and I still haven’t figured out how to get the other half back.  Oh well.  I had sufficient noise to function, and that’s what is really important here.