When it iRains, it iPours.

[captainsblog]

The 2013 State of the Technology address goes something like this:

::makes armpit fart::

* My primary computer for work and audio/video supply remains out of the house, with no promised return date. This 2004-era XP laptop is my reluctant go-to for Word, Excel, billing and, I discovered almost by accident, printing; I'd been running files down the hall to Eleanor's much better (but very picky about paper alignment and such) printer, not wanting to overload this one with a slew of new drivers for the printer in this office, but apparently, years ago, I did load them on, which is probably why it's so slow once it first opens any given proggie. So I can earn most of a living using this one until Vinny comes through.

* The XP machine in Emily's room can still do what it did- access the internet (as this one also can, if more slowly), and run a limited range of XP-compatible programs I never got to work with Vista on mine.  The first full fruit of that rolled out of the DVD drive earlier today.

* And DVDs are all we can watch, since there isn't a machine in the house that can stream anything we both can watch together with both audio and video. I can, and will, watch the next House of Cards on my tablet, but Eleanor's not following that series.

* My music didn't get saved beyond the limited amount that was stored on my phone. Since I couldn't sync the phone with my PC away (and really couldn't sync it during the day today- stay tuned), I turned to Alternate Means, importing a test CD onto the puter in Emily's room and then trying to sync that to my tablet. No luck; XP doesn't have ASUS Transformer drivers. So I did even more flipping and flopping, putting the tunes on an external drive and then connecting that to the tablet through Eleanor's docking station.... and stupidly forgot to import the tracks as mp3's, but Godot can apparently read m4a's, so the Indigo Girls Roseland bootleg (thank you, thunderemerald- I think) got me through my first cardio in three days.

* Oh, and I needed music on the tablet because my phone died. Dead dead dead. But it got better.

----

As of midday yesterday, my phone was little more than a phone. I couldn't get even a single additional photo onto it, much less any new music or apps. I suspected it was because a full phone OS upgrade was sitting on it, downloaded, waiting for me to approve for installation. Not that I could- the phone told me I'd need to clear over a gig of space on the phone to have enough room for it.  Ah, but if connected to iTunes, I could overcome that.

There's an earlier iTunes version on this computer, so I gave it a shot.  And missed.  It needed the new version 11- the same one that killed my PC last Monday. While it didn't kill this PC, it certainly didn't make it any stronger, and after hours of sitting and spinning trying to install the new IOS version for its sad self, my phone finally hung up in the middle of the update and wouldn't display anything other than this:



My only option, the PC told me, was to restore to Factory State, which would wipe everything- all music, all photos, and the only accessible copy of my work calendar at the moment.  I wasn't gonna risk that without an Apple-y imprimatur, so I headed, first, to the AT&T store where I bought the thing last year- and got nowhere. Their tools are less enabled than the ones I had at home; no, it was back to the Genius Bar for me at the first available appointment time, four hours later.

Of course they genius-ed it back to life. Our only Apple Store is at the Galleria Mall, the biggest shrine to conspicuous consumption for 100 miles, which I hate getting to only slightly less than I hate being in it. But, once inside the Temple of Jobs, I was welcomed, reset, and magically restored to a backup I apparently made yesterday that I have no recollection of at all.

I'm still at risk of losing all the music and pictures not on the phone, but at least I can practice law tomorrow without having to resort to pay phones.