sovay | And her head has no room

In which I pay for all of yesterday's grinning. There's karmic balance; there really is. I have a migraine, but there is a greater problem: my iTunes library has eaten itself. No music. I'm not quite sure how this happened, and it puzzles me greatly, but I think my computer and I are both heading for the doctor's in the near future.*

On the bright side, the ever-impressive

eredien has created livejournal icons from The Cuckoo, so that I now have a terrific icon of Psholtii looking pretty much the way I feel right now. I need a paid account just so I can support my growing icon habit.

Also, since I got into an offline argument about Keats yesterday, am I wrong? Are there reasons I should really like him? I'll give him "La Belle Dame Sans Merci," because I have a soft spot for demon lovers a mile wide, but otherwise I'm mostly left wanting to read Matthew Arnold or Swinburne or any other Romantic but Wordsworth. Distract me. Please.

*I didn't mention before that a few days ago, my mail program also cannibalized one of its own folders, and I lost pretty much all of my writing-related correspondence since 2003. This was not such a disaster, since I'm obsessive and paranoid when it comes to certain areas of my life, and so I had most of the files backed up. I don't think there's anyone's address I lost that I couldn't get back one way or another, and important things like contracts and acceptances and edits are all recorded elsewhere. But I really, really don't want my laptop to crash and take something actually vital with it, say, this lecture I'm working on for Wednesday, or all of my finalized stories since 1999, so . . .

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

You don't mention your processor speed, and so I can't do a search for syndromic, widespread problems like yours.

Assuming you haven't had problems until now:

A. Consider updating to 10.4. I know, I know, $. This is most likely to solve everything without further tears. Install the disks and then run Software Update to pick up any maintenance and security releases, which will put you at 10.4.3.

Later 10.3 versions have well-known instabilities, and successive versions, though they correct known problems, introduce new ones. I updated my G3/900 to 10.3.5 and began seeing crashes and strange Finder behavior, which indicated a fundamental problem: files vanished, stuff wouldn't open, or would open and close instantly, etc. I replaced 10.3 with 10.4 and have not had a crash since (has been up continuously).

Install MS Office when you have updated. Versions 10 and 11 seem to be equally compatible with 10.4.

"Losing" files, in other words not "seeing" them in listings, does not mean they are overwritten. It can mean a directory is slightly screwed up.

Unix is robust, but programmers are not foolproof.

1. Your system could have become corrupted. Make a complete backup of applications and reinstall only the vanilla system from your original disks. Run software update. Reboot. Put some files back on and start shoving data around to see what happens. Reinstall Office from scratch, do not write it over from your backup. Just move your personal directory, if at all possible, which should contain all of your documents, photos, and music files. The beauty of the way the directory system works is that if you do keep all your personal files in a directory and do not scatter them into, say, the Applications folder, you have a far easier time backing up. Your mail, for example, can live in a folder in your personal directory.

Forgive me lecturing if you know this, a lot of people don't, and some older Mac programs will still store, say, your mail and its attachments, in the application folder by default.

The best response to "system corrupted" is still A, install 10.4.

And her head has no room

very fast look at your problem