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.

It’s almost 1:30 in the morning and I’m still up. Not sure why. But it’s a beautiful night and if I look out my window, I can see the city stretch out under a clear and dark sky. When I first moved in here, I instantly fell in love with the view. There are moments, like at dusk when the sun is casting rosy light through my window, when my life just seems really cool.
Anyway, blah blah. Oh, remind me to write about earlier this week when four firemen came to my door. Sounds like the opening of a gay porn film, doesn’t it? More later.

I saw a production of The Tempest at Lake Harriet last night. It was actually pretty good. The woman who played Ariel was this really cute redhead who was a perfect match for the part. Anyway, off to bed.

I just finished Less Than Zero. Besides being a study in upper class West Coast nihilism, it is an amusing study in 80s pop culture detritus. Every ten pages seemed to contain at least one reference to Betamax or Atari or some crappy band. I thought about renting the movie, but the reviews make it sound like some treacly just-say-no anti-drug propaganda. Too bad.
Is it me, or is the whole search for WMD in Iraq turning into a parody? “No, really, we totally know where they are! We’re pretty sure we saw nerve gas cannisters in this ditch outside Tikrit, but then the Rangers had this massive kegger and we kinda forgot about it and when we went back the next morning we were like ‘Dudes, WTF?’ But we swear we saw them sitting there last week. But don’t worry, we got mad skillz when it comes to finding shit and we’ll have a major WMD stash sitting on the front lawn of the White House faster than you can say ‘Osama bin Laden.'”