Author: Mark

Mark works as a [REDACTED] for [REDACTED], currently residing in Iowa. CoffeeBear.net is a place for him to blather on about whatever strikes his fancy. He currently spends his "free" time working on a photography project, playing with his cat and attempting to keep his wife happy (not necessarily in that order).

One of my co-workers sent me this list of campaign slogans that Bush/Cheney could use. I found it amusing, so here it is:

  • Bush/Cheney ’04: Four More Wars!
  • Bush/Cheney ’04: Apocalypse Now!
  • BU__ SH__!
  • Bush/Cheney ’04: Because the truth just isn’t good enough.
  • Bush/Cheney ’04: Compassionate Colonialism.
  • Bush/Cheney ’04: Leave no billionaire behind.
  • Bush/Cheney ’04: Over a billion Whoppers served.
  • Bush/Cheney ’04: Putting the “con” in conservatism.
  • Bush/Cheney ’04: Thanks for not paying attention.
  • Bush/Cheney ’04: This time, elect us!
  • Bush/Cheney ’04: We’re Gooder!
  • Bush/Cheney ’04: Asses of Evil
  • Don’t think. Vote Bush!
  • George W. Bush: A brain wave away from the presidency
  • George W. Bush: It takes a village idiot.
  • Vote Bush in ’04: “I Has Incumbentory Advantitude”
  • Vote Bush in ’04: Because dictatorship is easier.
  • Vote Bush in ’04: It’s a no-brainer!
  • Vote for Bush & You Get Dick!
  • Who would Jesus Bomb?
  • Bush/Cheney ’04: “Leave no child a dime!”

I started trying to backup all my music from my iPod to DVD-Rs last night and K3B said it successfully burned all the files straight from the iPod to disc, but upon looking at the disc; it was obviously a bad burn (only the center of the disc had “grooves”). I was busy with other things and didn’t get a chance to work on this any further than that last night.

Today while I was home for lunch, I tried playing around with iTunes & the iPod under Windows some more; it’s free single Tuesday, after all! Initially I didn’t have much luck but I did some more searching online and found more suggestions. Most of them didn’t look very helpful or promising, but one said to drop the iPod into the dock, disconnect the dock from the computer and reconnect it.

For whatever reason, that worked! Yeah baby! I got the new free single and a bunch of MP3s I downloaded the other day; so now I’m good to go with additional music. *joy* 🙂

Over the weekend, I started visiting some MP3 blogs and downloading some of the free tracks out there for extra listening material on my iPod. Today over lunch, I booted my home computer into Windows; so I could transfer those tracks to the iPod1. However it seems I’ve been biten by a bug in the iTunes/iPod software.

See, iTunes wouldn’t launch with the iPod connected; it would start in the background but wouldn’t display the GUI (at least it wouldn’t do it quick enough to satisfy me). If I disconnected the iPod, launched iTunes, reconnected the iPod then iTunes would continue to run but would fail to see the iPod. I tried dinking around with this for a while (rebooting, disconnecting, reconnecting, checking for updates and whatnot) but didn’t get any closer to having iTunes recognize the iPod. Though at one point an error message did pop-up telling me I needed to reformat the iPod.

I started searching Apple’s website, as I remembered hearing that there was an issue like this back in April when the last update for iTunes/iPod was released. The most info I could find basically told me to backup, reformat the iPod and try again. *sigh*

That’s not something I really wanted to hear. I guess tonight I’ll be booting back into Linux; backing up the data from the iPod to DVD-Rs and then trying some more drastic measures to get the iPod working right again.

Oh and the other reason I’m upset with iTunes; is that I forgot to go buy some songs from them over the weekend and hence had zero chance to win a free Powerbook. *double sigh*

1 For the record, I am familiar with gtkPod but it gives me errors everytime I try and get it just to read from my iPod which makes me disinclined to use it to write to the iPod.