The Republic of T.

Well, at least now I know why I did it.

On December 31st, the four-year-old PC I used almost exclusively for gaming up and died on me. I turned it on to find that it wouldn't load Windows XP and made a strange clicking noise for several minutes before telling me the second hard drive was fried. Shortly afterwards, the mother board joined the hard drive in its demise. I knew then it was dead. I'd added a second hard drive, upgraded the RAM and the video card, but a new mother board was beyond my capabilities.

By January 1st withdrawal and depression started to set in. By January 2nd, I was out buying a new PC, just for gaming. I felt silly at the time, but now I know I was just fulfilling a psychological need.

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Quick. How much does a black panther cost, and what will he do once you buy him? Well, if it’s former Black Panther Bobby Rush he might turn a trick or two if the price is right. The right price is $1 million, and here’s what it’ll get you.

On April 27, [the BlackCommentator.com] BC published two stories about CBC member Bobby Rush’s sponsorship of this year’s noxious telco legislation. We explained how the Rush-Barton Act, also called the COPE Act or HR 5252, would kill off public access TV, strip towns and cities of the right to force cable monopolies to serve blacker and poorer areas in return for being able to do business in the wealthier parts of town, and allow companies to charge web sites like this one for allowing content or email to reach users. We called attention to the acceptance of a million dollar donation by a tentacle of AT&T to a not for profit organization associated with the congressman. All this earned us a call that morning from a Chicago-based defender of the congressman.

BC was making a big mistake, the caller told us, by leading with the issue of network neutrality. Our deeply misguided caller accused us of playing into the hands of white media activists. Network neutrality, she said again and again in the course of an hour long conversation, was just not “our issue.”

But when a black member of congress accepts a million dollar telco donation for a supposed community-based project in his district, and turns up as co-sponsor of telco legislation to redline and disempower black communities nationwide, along with suppressing everybody’s freedom of access to the Internet, it is indeed a black issue.

Well, it is. But there are folks better at explaining why than I am. And since I haven’t blogged about it much yet, I’ll let them do it.

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And, after a long struggle, I have won. I know, I know. A few people advised me to wait until the next WWDC, in case any new iPods were announced. But to be honest, I couldn’t see going that long with no music on my commutes. Besides, as soon as I bought my fist iPod the photo and video iPods were announced. So there’s always going to be a new one around the corner.

But before my success, I spent four hours on the phone with Apple Care support and made a trip to the Genius Bar at the Apple store to get the new iPod working. And after all that I ended up solving the problem by doing some googling, and finding the one answer that none of the experts at Apple Care or the Genius Bar came up with. (And when they finally did, I found a much easier way to do it than they recommended.) I will now attempt to relate my experience here, and unfold the mystery a troublesome file named “iPodDriver.kext.” If nothing else maybe some other hapless person will come across it and be helped.

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Well, I think it’s really and truly dead. I mentioned before that it was on life support. Well, I think it’s almost time to pull the plug. My attempts to resuscitate it this morning came to naught, and tonight I came home and tried everything suggested on this webpage. I reset it. I restored it. I reinstalled the software. I even reinstalled iTunes.Nothing.

At one point this evening, it seemed to work. After restoring it, iTunes started up and immediately recognized it. Soon, the iPod was updating and all the songs were being loaded. Since I had something like 14 to 15 GB of music, I figured it would take a while, so I went out to the grocery store. By the time I came back, iTunes had dropped the iPod again. They were back to not speaking to each other after a brief reconciliation. Nothing I could do would bring them back together.

So, it looks like I’ll be taking it to the nearest Apple Store tomorrow to see if there’s anything they can do for it. I’ve been holding off on getting a video iPod, but if they can’t resurrect this one, I may finally have an excuse. I’ll have to buy a new one, because I enjoy my commute a lot less without it. Instead of music, I listen to the roar of traffic, the groaning of the escalator, the droning of the recording announcing the closing of the subway doors, and the inane conversations going on around me. Plus, without earbuds in my ears, I might end up having to talk to someone I don’t want to. (The iPod is, after all, one half of the social shield of iPod+book/magazine.)

Besides, my commute is about the only time I get to listen to music anyway. And I’d like to be able to choose from my whole collection rather than having to pick a playlist and stick with it for the day. So, I may be doing some shopping this weekend. And with my luck I’ll get a video iPod and Apple will announce the next generation days later.

Help. It started sometime a week ago, and I finally tried to do something about it tonight. A while ago, I noticed my iPod wasn’t showing up in iTunes anymore. It showed up in the Finder in Mac OS X, but not in iTunes. What’s more, iTunes began launching every time I start my computer, even though it doesn’t detect my iPod.

So, I looked around online for advice and tried some of the stuff I found here. Specifically, I got down to step 8 and tried reinstalling iTunes and the iPod firmware. That turned out to be a minor disaster because I couldn’t install iTunes. So I figured I had to uninstall it first. I dragged it to the trash, etc., and still couldn’t install. The installer said there was nothing to install.

So now I had no iTunes. At least not until I went here and found the info I needed. Voila. ITunes installed. So, I went back and started iTunes, and it announced that there was new software for my iPod and asked if I wanted to install it. Which I did. But it still doesn’t detect my iPod. It doesn’t show in iTunes and when I check iTunes preferences it says there’s no iPod attached. But the iPod does appear in the finder.

The only thing I haven’t done is restore my iPod. I guess I could back up my music collection and try that, but frankly it scares me. Who knows how that will turn out.

Any Mac whiz kids out there got any tips for me?

I’ve thus far resisted the urge to buy a video iPod, but this device — which records video directly to the iPod, from television or other sources — may just knock down my last excuse for not buying the gadget.

We’ve all had moments we’d rather not have become public knowledge. We’ve all done things we’d rather our friends and family — let alone the whole world — never know about. And there was a time when — except, say, for celebrities like Britney Spears — most of us never had to worry about the humiliation of our worst moments or embarrassing acts publicized That was, of course, before the web. Maybe it was before the age of the video camera. No, maybe it was before the advent of audio recording. Wait. Make that before the dawn of human speech. Well, maybe even before that.

My point is that public exposure of our human foibles is nothing new, and certainly wasn’t created by the web, but this tale of a lost cellphone is just the latest in a series of stories that illustrate how the web, combined with the popularity of blogging, the ubiquitous nature of videophones, and sites like YouTube., have brought about a rebirth of the pillory or the public stockade.

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So, yeah. I’ve completed the transition into a fresh, clean, new blog. I ended up going with a new Wordpress installation because, frankly, there are some interesting platforms out there, but I wasn’t able to fine one that had a theme I liked. Textpattern holds some promise, though, if they make their templating system easier. In the meantime, I’m hoping that moving my old content to archives.republicoft.com and starting with a fresh database will be less taxing on Wordpres and MySQL. After all, I’m down several hundred thousand rows of data now, and the site’s cached (as it was before).

I’ve had help from several people on this, from my hosting company to technically talented friends of mine. From all of them — who looked at my database and site configuration — the verdict was that the problem was something in Wordpress code that was causing the database load. Interestingly enough, it didn’t seem to be the traffic that was the problem. It happened whenever I posted something. I went a day or two without posting, and nothing happened. Then I wrote a few posts in Wordpress and scheduled them to post the next day since I was going to be busy. That’s when all hell broke loose. Every time something posted.

So, I’m hopefull that the new set-up will improve things. I’m also optimistic that whatever the coding problem was, it will be fixed in an upcoming version of Wordpress. I hope so anyway. If not, well, I now know several ways to get my data out of Wordpress and into another platform. Maybe I’ll do a series of posts on those platforms and my experience with each of them.

For now, I have to update the new site with an actual blogroll and a few other thing. Also, my apologies to folks whose comments didn’t make the transition into the new set-up. Actually, none of them did.