I know I was pretty vague last night, and I obviously held back with what I really felt. You can tell I held back, because the world didn’t end….

About an hour before I posted about my feelings toward Apple or Mac or whatever they’re called, I found out about a new version of whatever it is available for the Nano, and I downloaded it, ran it, and thought I was updating my Nano, making it spiffier and better, or something….

I should’ve known better, especially when the little touchy-clicky-wheel thing stopped making the screen light up while it was in ‘Do Not Connect’ mode. Also, that startup screen I remember from when I started it for the first time.

The update said it was finished, and I went through the whole ‘disconnect’ process, and I found myself looking at the language selection screen.

And then I found myself looking at everything being empty.

Also, the ‘About’ screen said there were 0 files, but only 500mb free.

So…upsetting, and all that. Especially since I was right in the middle of The Mark. The audiobook is read by someone other than the guy who read the first…seven or so. This guy gives people funny voices. The Antichrist sounds like The Count from Sesame Street, and his second-in-command turned minister or whatever sounds like someone trying to be The Godfather, or something.

That, and all the other songs I had on it that I didn’t actually keep a proper list of. Meh.

I couldn’t get my computer to communicate with the iPod. I couldn’t get Gremlin’s laptop to communicate with it, either.

I went through a number of uninstalls and reinstalls of iTunes, and both iPod updaters. At first, the updater wouldn’t do anything but say ‘initializing’. The earlier one claimed to not work with the iPod that was plugged in once, which seemed somehow hope-inspiring, but it didn’t actually mean anything.

After a while, there were errors of several different varities. I tried different usb ports, but that didn’t change anything.

Finally, the thing started showing up in My Computer as removable storage. An hour after that, I was able to actually get it to load in the Disk Management thing in my Admin Tools’ Computer Management thing.

There, I was able to reformat it [as FAT32, of course]. That was really the only choice — the files were lost anyway, and I just wanted the damned thing to work again.

Once that was done, the latest ipod updater was more than pleased to restore the thing to factory defaults, or whatever, which I might as well have done to begin with, because it would’ve been the same thing.

I’m down to 300 some files from 2000+, which is strange and upsetting, but at least it works again.