My Mac was possessed
My MacBook, which turns three in June and appears to be in perfect health, started acting up last week. The trackpad became unresponsive, the mouse would drag icons around and make ghostly copies — it was driving me insane.
I thought the memory might be full, but instead of moving files to my backup disk as a sensible person would, I decided to clean up my files. There’s a lot of crap on the hard drive, copies of copies eating up space. If you move a picture from the desktop to iPhoto, the picture is copied but it remains on the desktop. Every download remains in the Downloads folder even when it’s been moved to iTunes. Surely I could delete the MP3s from the Downloads folder without them disappearing from iTunes? Presumably they are in the iTunes library.
To make sure, I moved the MP3 file of a song from Downloads to the trash. Then I played the song on iTunes. It played. So I deleted a couple of hundred MP3s, freeing up a bit of memory. Then I had a strange feeling and played a random song on iTunes. It wouldn’t. The file could not be located. I had trashed it.
I clicked through the songs on iTunes and discovered dozens that “could not be located.” Now, most of these songs are in my iPods so they weren’t gone forever, but I was consumed by anxiety. What if my main iPod gave out? It’s six years old.
You can’t just move a song from your iPod to iTunes. So I launched the Senuti app that makes these transfers possible. Senuti said my free trial had expired; if I wanted to use it I had to pay up. I deleted the file and downloaded a new version. It was not fooled: my free trial was still expired.
Meanwhile the mouse had gone nuts, making ghosts that would not go away. I was close to throwing things (but not my MacBook. I am not crazy, my MacBook is. Maybe I shouldn’t have named it Marat). On the net I found a free program called Pod to Mac. While it was downloading I went to a users’ forum to look up a diagnosis for my trackpad problem. Inevitably there is some jerk who will say that the solution is to get a PC. Haha, clever. He will not feel so clever the next time his PC is infected by a virus, which often happens.
Apparently the MacBook’s battery, which is located under the trackpad, expands with time. It pushes up against the trackpad, confusing it and jamming the clicker. So I removed the battery — the Mac was plugged into an electrical outlet — and voila! The trackpad regained its sanity. I am genius! I crowed, though technically I’d gotten help. Though I will admit that I’d already been calculating how much extra work I’d have to take on to afford a new Mac.
Sad how everything these days has a built-in expiration date beyond which it seems more practical to buy a new machine. The market rules that nothing be built to last — bad for profit margins. I miss the analog era, when you could have gadgets repaired at fix-it shops. Every time the rubber band thingy on my Walkman snapped I took it to a brilliant dwarf repairman in Cubao. There are still repairmen in Manila — you can have a VHS machine fixed, then you wonder what for — but they tend not to be at the mall. I seldom venture outside mall biosphere these days; this city is cruel to pedestrians.
My iTunes library was reconstructed, Marat the MacBook back at work. But I was too knackered to write a column about my cats so here’s one about computer-based torment.
P.S. My friend said, “No Pinoy author in history has used the word ‘knackered’.” So there.
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http:/ www.jessicarulestheuniverse.com Twisted by Jessica Zafra Pumping irony since 1994.
