…when one can get over a hump? Time will tell.
The “Be Positive” coloring and writing journal that Lynne gave me–May of 22?–that I use for coloring and speculating about what I’m writing or should be writing and the inspirations and challenges involved. Today, after I wrote next to the page I’d colored, I closed the book and laughed at that name…be positive. Gotta say what I wrote today in the journal is maybe one of the least positive things I think/feel. The words I almost never say out loud because they would likely be misunderstood or else prompt advice or guidance that I’m not looking for. That’s not my Aries resistance to being directed or told what to do. It’s only that this Aries knows herself–myself–too well to pretend I’m looking for answers from outside when the answers within have been hard won.
On the other hand, the drawing I colored is pretty and untroubled.
Plus I have written today, and every bit of writing nourishes the Muse who in turn nourishes my creative drive.
While writing, I listened to really good music all the way around, meaning of course, music I like/enjoy/admire/feel.
Kicked off with Brighter: A Duncan Sheik Collection from Duncan Sheik, and great liner notes from James Hunter (from Rolling Stone magazine). Certain parts of Hunter’s notes resonate with me, and the music is good to listen to, write to, think to.
Tom and I were on a road trip many years ago when we stopped somewhere and bought a bunch of CDs so we could hear music we didn’t know, and that’s when we got Shinedown’s The Sound of Madness. I used to hear it a lot because I uploaded it to my iTunes library, but after my main iTunes computer stopped working early in the pandemic, the only songs that will play on my iTunes are ones I’ve actually purchased from Apple. We still need to either get that Mac fixed or figure out what we can grab from its backup drive. That task has been “on the list” since the world reopened in 2021.
Finally, The Best of Simon & Garfunkel. No explanation needed, right? WAY BACK when I was given my first record player, a Simon & Garfunkel album was one of the first three I received, probably for a birthday. They never get old, and their song “The Boxer” still does battle with Bruce Springsteen’s “Thunder Road” as my favorite song of all time. There’s a nod to the duo in the first novel in the Neverending Saga.
Shared before but always happy to show Becky’s First Record Player. There were times it felt like the only thing teenage Becky could count on. In the current novel in progress, a character has just received her first record player and a collection of 45s. Lucky little nine-year-old. I was a few years older when I got mine.
I can definitely state from my experience that my iTunes library still works and none of it is stuck to Apple. I manually imported my CDs into their audio formats, but I ended up typing in an enormous amount of track data and playlisting, especially for my records I recorded to my own CDs. And, that library was moved during covid to a more modern Apple computer.
So, it may be possible your library just needs to be coppied into a newer Apple computer. The databases though have evolved, so it may still be painful to salvage yet worthwhile in the end. The worst case should be the file structure and contents does copy over to the new compiter, say SFTP, but you could gave to walk your library to manually drag and drop tracks into playlists!
The Brides know a guy who we’ll eventually bring into our iMac saga, and we’re hoping that whatever made iMac the 3rd go black wasn’t some kind of system failure or malware that replicated itself on the backup drive. (In that case, I’ll have lost thousands of photos and all that uploaded music. This happened to me before on iMac the 1st in maybe 2012. We don’t discuss it, but that’s when we started buying external hard drives to act as a time machine backup.)
iMac the 2nd still exists, but we were told by Apple years ago that it would eventually fail and would be unfixable. We pulled the photos off its backup drive and put them on iMac the 4th. But iMac the 4th has its own problems–it was brand new in 2020 and quickly began to act like a relic from AOL dial-up days. I don’t save any new photos on it.
My MacPatience has been greatly tested by all these issues.
Wow! Like, Wow: The Sequel!
I’m sorry you had all those problems. Apple has also done its share of “We don’t want you doing that anymore” to me as well. Aperture was replaced with a pathetic dummy-like substitute like Photos. They then prevented me from recovering lost data from my backup DVDs I made using their optical drives, so Linux read them for me instead allowing me to recover my lost schoolwork. It’s sad, because when Steve Jobs was around, a lot of what they did had a purpose and was actually useful. It was the iPod that mainly kept me in their loop.
Apple was the first personal computer I learned on–for a foray into contract work in 1986–and bought for myself. Later, I worked on PCs in some offices, but I’ve always preferred Apple for my own computers (Tom had an iPod and later an iPad, and I chose an iPad, too), and I switched to their phones sometime in the first decade of this century (got my first cell phone in 1995, I think, and my first iPhone in maybe 2005?).
It was at Virginia Tech’s library when the iMac colors with CRTs inside showed up. Then, later in the great big grocery store sized Math lab full of the more modern flat LCD screened iMacs that got me into Apple’s world. So, that made sense of their Apples for the Students, to get us to like their designs over Microsoft and probably get us to buy their stuff.
But later, from my first iPod nano and onward much much later into iPhone, they pulled me away from destroying my CDs with a walkman while I’m skating/biking or otherwise in the gym, etc.
I can’t really say their pocket sized super computer emphasizes usefullness without aggravating me to the point I want to crush it into the ground. I think they lost their direction with these things just to claim new, improoved and noun+.
I get tired of the constant push to upgrade operating systems, which doesn’t seem to happen so often on PCs.