The ADSL fight continues

I ordered a new phone line today with the stipulation that it must be ADSL capable. Apparently by stipulating the code NPGDSL (no pair gain digital subscriber line) it forces them to try and find an alternate cabling route that will meet their transmission loss standards.

The best chances for success occur when a) you have been rejected for excessive transmission loss CHECK and b) you have neighbours who have successfully received ADSL already CHECK.

I can expect an answer from the cable assigner within about 4 days apparently.

Fingers crossed because my next stop is to contact the papers and go on a 'hunger strike for broadband'.

A Night with the Mummies

Carole has a mother's group she goes to and occasionally they go to a movie. She mentioned that they had picked A Night at the Museum to see and that she had no interest in it at all. So I mentioned that I would love to see it since I like Ben Stiller movies a lot...

Long story short I ended up at the cinema last night with the Mummies. No other husbands, just me and the Mummies. Carole was peeved that I even went for drinks afterwards, where I learned lots of stuff...Like Patrick likes to stand up & pee in the bath and when told you shouldn't pee in the bath he reaches down and swirls it around to mix it in better & Rachael drove her car into the garage with a $10k bike on the roof and wrecked the bike, the garage & the car.

The movie was very good btw. Laughs were a little spare in the 1st half but I laughed quite a bit in the 2nd half. 7/10.

Frustratapod

I recently bought an 80gb Ipod video and an Ipod HiFi speaker dock. After dumping all 60gb of my music onto it everything was going swimmingly.

Then I docked it back into my pc and I-Tunes 7 tells me my ipod is in recovery mode and needs to be restored. Huh? So I do the restore (which takes it back to bare metal btw), I-Tunes tells me to leave it connected and it will be re-detected. But it tells me again that the ipod is in recovery mode and needs to be restored.

Off to google where I quickly found this apple support article and the penny dropped...I had plugged a camera in before docking the ipod. The ipod was trying to get the same logical drive letter as the camera but obviously couldn't. Quick bit of rearranging in disk management and voila, I-Tunes is happy with the ipod when it is docked again.

What a meaningful message to describe not being able to get a drive letter -> "iTunes has detected an iPod in recovery mode - Use iTunes to restore"

4 hours later and I have my music back on the ipod.

Fast forward a week. Wake up this morning and groggily walk over to the ipod docked in the hi-fi to play some wake up music. No playlists. Hmmm. No artists. Shit. No songs. Fuckin Hell. Nothing. Still have my movies, tv shows etc but not one skerrick of music.

Open I-Tunes and all my music is there. So how can my music be on I-Tunes but not on the ipod. It's not actually possible to delete music from the ipod without using I-Tunes (or some other software on the pc) which is mega st00pid anyway. So what happened?

More googling, this time no explanation presents itself quickly. More head scratching. Finally I try to play one of the songs in I-Tunes. It can't be found, would I like to locate it? Hmmm. Check the songs can be played directly from the USB external drive I keep them on. No probs. Must be a drive assignment issue. Can't find the drive letter assigned when they were loaded into I-Tunes...I-Tunes just says it can't be found. Finally found the drive assignment in an xml file in the i-tunes tree under my documents. Yep the drive now has a different assignment. Change it back to the one that i-tunes loaded from a week ago and back in business.

So what actually happened? Last night I docked the ipod and it set off to auto sync. In the meantime I watched an episode of Las Vegas. So I-tunes must have gone to sync and not been able to get at any songs so decides to delete everything off of the ipod...jebus

4 more hours later and I again have my music back on the ipod.

But for how long?