Missing Link

So, I promised to write more and didn’t really follow through with it.   At least not how I had initially intended - as close to daily updates as I could get. This is largely due to external factors that have made this week one of the roughest I’ve endured yet, which hopefully is not indicative of what’s to come this year.

This morning I read an article (on CNN) that talked about a girl in Papua New Guinea who was burned alive, suspected of being a witch. It helped put my plight into perspective: sure I am having a rough few weeks at work, but at least nobody has tried to set me on fire (yet – I wouldn’t put it past them here). No matter how bad the past two days have been (and the next couple will undoubtedly be), at least I’m not being burned alive.  Or dying in any other nightmare inducing, incredibly painful, absolutely horrifying way. 

Keeping that in mind helps. Not much, but enough. 

Changing the subject to something a tad less morbid, iTunes is now going DRM free. That’ll finally shut up those who slam the service for it’s “invasive” use of DRM technology in the digital entertainment it distributes. For those who say “great,  but what about all the stuff I *already* bought?   That’s all still got DRM.” True, it does. It won’t magically disappear, either. You can, however, upgrade it to DRM free – for a fee. The fee is approx.  $0.30 per song, or 30% of an albums CURRENT price.  Music videos are $0.60 apiece. For my paltry 52 albums that I’ve bought through iTunes over the years it will cost me approximately $175 to upgrade to iTunes Plus (DRM Free).   

So, some of you may be wondering why this even matters. Others undoubtedly already know. DRM limits the consumer in how they can use the music they purchase. It limits the numbers of computers you can play it on, what devices can play it, and even what software you MUST use to play it. Removing that brings freedom back to the end user, allowing him or her to play the music via any software (that supports AAC playback, anyways) and/or hardware device (that supports AAC playback, anyways). This means, after upgrading, that I would be able to play my entire music library in Linux, for instance, with any of a number of software packages capable of AAC playback. The DRM free recordings are also of higher quality, so it’s got that going for it… Which is nice.

I guess if I lived in Papua New Guinea, I probably wouldn’t want to be known as a computer wizard. That might lead to unfortunate events.

I’ve always felt a strong connection to music that I have had a difficult time trying to convey to others.  To many people music is just a diversion – something they put on in the background while they work or get dressed in the morning. With the complete trash that can often be found on the radio, though, who can blame them for this view?    For others, though, music is a very powerful art form. 

I often find myself listening to music and having it transport me to another time and place – either past or future (rarely present, since I am where I am, thanks to the laws of physics).  It makes me feel a variety of emotions, evokes strong memories of times past, and in some cases gives me some idea of what I want for the future.  Of course, my feeble attempt at explaining how music moves me is falling far short of adequacy.

By far the most common reaction I have to music is one of nostalgia – certain songs evoke incredibly strong memories of good times past,   times that I miss, that were simpler and easier and in some ways happier.   This usually happens when I’m feeling unhappy about something (most often work).  I’ll hear a song that I listened to many times when I was younger and it’ll remind me of those days.  It’s not that I want to be a kid again in the true sense, but there are times when I do wish I could return to such a state of innocence. 

An increasingly common reaction I have to some music, however, are images in my head of how things COULD be in the future.  Usually this involves settling down with Ann,  creating a wonderful home with her and raising a family.   It’s INCREDIBLY difficult to explain this.  It’s not a narrative of how things would happen, but more a feeling – of completeness, happiness, satisfaction and success.  Mix a little bit of pride in there as well.   Music just happens to be the catalyst that causes these feelings / the train of thought.  

Once again – I fear I’m doing an abysmal job of describing this.  MOST of you are probably scratching your heads wondering if I’ve had a little too much vodka today.   I promise – I’ve not been drinking (my typing, and grammar, would be MUCH worse than they already are… you’d know.  Spell check can only do so much.)

I do find it interesting, though, how just hearing a song I’ve not heard in a LONG time can bring back a flood of memories that have been locked in the very far recesses of my consciousness.   

A few days ago, I wrote about my ipod’s hard drive failing, and how I was going about fixing it. At that point, I hadn’t yet recieved the replacement drive I had ordered, so I wasn’t able to detail the final portions of the repair.

As I mentioned in my post last night about how I want to get a Macbook Pro (seriously, my birthday is coming up… in 23 days), I successfully repaired the iPod. The finishing steps were remarkably simple, and having a fully working iPod only took me a total of 10 minutes of actual work.

The most difficult part of this hard drive installation was opening the fedex box it was shipped in. Once I had it out, I affixed the blue rubber bumpers, and the blue foam pad to the drive and hooked it into the ribbon cable as the previous drive had been. The case covers then snapped together perfectly, as before. At this point, you have an ipod with a blank hard drive in it. If you try to turn it on, you get a folder icon with an exclamation point (which, if you look it up on apple’s site, usually means the software needs to be restored, which in our case is quite true).

From there, I plugged the iPod into my powerbook. I already had iTunes open, and it promptly informed me that the ipod that was connected needed to be restored because it appeared to be corrupted. I expected, and anticipated that . I hit the restore button, which took it through the process of re-installing the iPod software onto the iPod. This took a matter of 10-15 seconds, very fast. I was then prompted to plug my iPod into an external power source, in my case the external power adapter that came with it (I’m not sure how the newer generation will handle this, since they don’t come with external adapters, perhaps they aren’t required to perform this step?). Once I did this, my iPod flashed through some stuff, asked my preferred language, and basically went through the initial setup as if it were a brand new iPod.

From there, it was just another plug in to the powerbook to download my music library onto it.

All in all, the whole process went incredibly fast, and was mostly painless. I definitely don’t recommend it to anyone who has a warranty or applecare, as it will void that. If, however, you’ve got an older iPod that isn’t covered anymore, and you don’t feel like spending a ton of money on buying a new one, this is definitely a fairly easy alternative if you don’t mind tinkering. Besides, there’s something strangely satisfying about repairing your own iPod.

Arguably one of the most popular technological gadgets these days is the Apple iPod. Since it’s introduction a few years ago, it’s sales have soared and no competing product has come close to matching it’s market share. Microsoft recently released their “ipod killer” named Zune, but due to poor implementation and some very odd technical decisions on their part ( such as it’s inability to play purchased windows media files that have the Microsoft “Plays for sure” DRM). Quite obviously, Apple has a hit on their hands. In fact, the iPod has performed so well that Apple’s iTunes music store had problems handling the volume this past christmas.

I personally love the ipod. It enables me to carry my whole music library with me anywhere I go. While some people don’t really care about that ability, citing that they can swap out which music is on their player of choice easily enough, I do care about it. I like having all of my music easily accessible, and with the “on the go” playlists, I can dynamically create a playlist that suits my current mood, drawing from any of my thousands of songs.

Now, as much as I love my iPod(s), they haven’t been without their own problems. I have two iPods, a 4th Gen (pre photo) iPod, and a 5th gen iPod Video. 11 months after I got the 4th Gen iPod, it died. More specifically it’s hard drive failed. I hadn’t gotten applecare for it, becuase at the time I didn’t want to spend the extra $50. I was lucky it died when it did, as I still had one month left on the warranty so I could get it replaced for free* (I paid for shipping). I did so. And for the past year it has worked very well. In september (around september, not sure of the exact month) I got the new ipod. I’ve used it most of the time since I got it, using the older one only occasionally. On new years day, however, I woke up to find that my old ipod, which I had left connected to my powerbook and charging overnight, was making a rather ominous clicking sound. *click* *click* *click*

I knew it wasn’t good, and knew exactly what the problem was: the hard drive. Again. Unfortunately for me, when Apple replaced my iPod a year ago, they didn’t also extend the warranty (how sneaky of them!), so there was no way apple would repair/replace it for free this time, and in fact it would cost me a couple hundred dollars to get it fixed through them. Instead of that, I had a different idea.

Since I already have a newer ipod (with applecare this time), and since this old one is out of warranty anyways (and is already broken), I figured I would try to repair it myself. The first step to doing this was to figure out how to get the ipod open, so that I could get the old hard drive out and put a replacement drive in.

That turned out to be fairly easy, actually. All ipods are a plastic front shell, married to a shiny metal backing. There’s a seam between the two, where you can slide a very thin (VERY thin) screwdriver into and slide it down the length of the ipod to release the clips inside that hold the halves together. Once that’s done, you can carefully and slowly lift the backing away from the front. It’s important to be careful at this step, though, as there is a ribbon cable connecting the two halves ( it’s for the headphone jack, if I’m not mistaken, and it’s also not very long). Once you have that done, it’s pretty easy to get the hard drive out. It’s a standard IDE interface for mini hard drives, so the drive should seperate pretty easily from the ribbon cable it’s connected to. You may have to wiggle it a little bit to get it out, but be careful to not be too forceful.

The hard drive itself is surrounded by blue shock absorbing bumpers. It’s also covered on one side by a light blue foam material. The blue bumpers come off without a problem, but you’ll need to be careful taking the blue foam off. You’ll likely need something that you can use to scrape it off, like a knife or a razor scraper. You’ll want to keep it intact, so don’t just rip it off.

Once you have the foam off, you’ll notice the part # of the hard drive. For the 4th Gen’s like mine (20 gig), it’s a Toshiba MK2004GAL. Now that I had the part number, ordering a replacement turned out to be pretty easy. While I couldn’t find a MK2004GAL I did find a MK2006GAL, which has the same dimensions and specs (as far as I could tell) as the MK2004GAL.

The drive has not arrived yet, so I haven’t yet finished the repairs. The next steps are pretty straight forward though, so I will outline them here and do a followup post with the end results when I’ve completed the project.

The next step is, obviously, to put in the new hard drive. It’s as simple as attaching the blue foam to the drive, putting the bumpers back on and hooking the drive into the ipod chassis. Once that’s done, I’ll put the two halves back together (they snap together). I’ll then have a repaired (though as of yet unformatted) iPod. From there it’s just a matter of hooking the ipod up to my mac and restoring the software to it. That’s a pretty fast and painless process, and when I’m done I should have a good as new ipod ready to hold all of my music again.

Total cost? Less than $100.

The process has taught me something: Don’t be affraid of tinkering. I used to LOVE to tinker with things. I’d pull apart computers, pull out hardware and put new hardware in, mix and match and see what worked well and what didn’t. I’d take things apart to see how they worked (and in some cases figure out ways to fix them so they’d work). Nowadays, I feel this strong hesitation to do anything of the sort. This idea that “if you take it apart, you’ll void the warranty and then you’ll never get it fixed!” And I wonder where I got this fear from. Having seen through the process of fixing my own ipod how easy it is to do, I’ve realized how much I enjoy doing things like this. I think it’s been a wakeup call for me that I should do stuff like this more often. Sorry Corporate America, you won’t keep me in check with your silly little warranties anymore.

Note:  click on any of the above images for a larger version.

In this day and age, the radio waves are chalk full of unimaginative and uninspired crap that people consider popular music. Bands like Staind and Nickleback are revered by the masses, while those of us who have a soul and aren’t part of the herd of sheep known as “the masses” are left wondering what the hell they are thinking. I often find myself wondering how anybody could consider that crap to be music. I generally feel the same way about rap, too, though I think some rap actually has some merit. Don’t quote me on that, though.

The radio stations almost exclusively play cookie cutter band music. My Chemical Romance, Red Jumpsuit Apparatus, Fallout Boy… all of these bands sound exactly the same. A few weeks ago, while driving home from the office (and without the luxury of my ipod) I was listening to the radio and heard a song by Red Jumpsuit Apparatus. I distinctly remember thinking “wow, I’ve heard this exact same song, with different lyrics”. They all sound the SAME. They’re all following the same formula and style as if they honestly have no idea how to create innovative and new music. They’re affraid of breaking the mold because they see the mold as the way to make money. In short, they’re less about making good music and more about making money by making mediocre (at best) music that the masses happily gobble up.

It’s largely for this reason that I don’t listen to the radio, unless (as i mentioned above) I’m without my ipod or a cd of songs burned from my music collection. I find little of any value there. I mostly hear about new music (new to me, anyways) from friends and family. I listen to a lot of Indie music, and stuff that I never (or at most, rarely) hear on the radio.

One of the bands I heard about through a friend, Phil Schroeder, is Muse. He introduced me to them almost exactly two years ago, as we were going to work out in the fitness center at SJC. He asked me, as he put in the cd, to tell him who I thought they sounded like. Almost as soon as I heard it, I immediately thought “radiohead”, which was exactly his thinking too. They did have a sound very similar to older radiohead (think: OK Computer). I borrowed the CD and after listening to more of it, I found that while they did pull some cues from radiohead, they had a distinctly unique sound as well. They took some influence from Radiohead, but didn’t make that the whole of their sound, but rather a part of it. Because of that, they have produced a sound that will make anyone who loved the old radiohead (before they became so bizarre and electronic) instantly fall in love. Of the three albums I’ve heard ( Origin of Symmetry, Absolution, and Black Holes & Revelations), I have yet to find much I dislike. Some of the songs on Absolution are a bit rough around the edges, but still manage to sound good. Nearly every song on Black Holes & Revelations are very solid and well produced, elevating it as slightly above the other two albums. The tracks starlight and Neo-Politics are two of my favorites, as they are filled with such magical energy that while listening to them sometimes all I can do is sit and stare blankly in wide eyed wonder. There are few albums that give me that feeling of freedom, that sense of wonderment. OK Computer , by radiohead, was perhaps one of the first albums I got that ever did that.

Now, it’s important to note that while I compare them a lot to radiohead, Muse is it’s own sound. It borrows from radiohead’s successes but it also adds it’s own to it, changing it all and taking ownership of the completed whole. The end result is that you don’t get another radiohead, but instead something far beyond what is radiohead. As Phil put it that night on the way to the fitness center “these guys are what radiohead should have been.”

As I listen to more new music (again, new to me) I will likely post more about my listening experiences. I’ve found that, while the radio plays mostly crap nowadays, there is still plenty of good music to be found if you’re willing to look for it.