CRASH and BURN

I was never one of those boys who couldn’t get his hands on a toy without taking it to pieces. I found myself to be mildly diverted by gadgets but only by what they could achieve, not by how they achieved it. In adulthood, I have never been seen as a pair of legs emerging from under a motorcar, feet pointing upwards. Indeed, I never even learned to drive. I have signally failed to attest to my manhood by stripping down a motorbike or dismantling a circular saw, two implements wholly alien to me. Changing the bulb in a torch is challenge enough. Sometimes I can’t even get the house keys to work.

So computers hold little intrinsic delight for me. By temperament and aptitude, I am a quill and vellum man. A computer is my friend if it does what I want it to do – indeed, does what I have been led to expect it can do for me – but beyond that I don’t care to know what goes on under the bonnet. Nor am I much given to taking delight in wrestling with – with a view to besting – a dumb but fiendishly clever object such as a programmed computer appears to be.

In a related matter, I derive little sustenance from the instruction books that come with modern electronic appliances. Time was, manuals were booklets of modest length, illustrated with colour photographs and expressed in simple, step-by-step directions. Now they are vast tomes hung about with line drawings and daunting diagrams, translated from the Japanese into unidiomatic English (and several other languages too, presumably with equal lack of feel and ear) and stupefyingly banal in their scope. For instance, they usually begin with tens of pages warning you against such unlikely behaviour as throwing the appliance into the bath while plugged into the mains, using it as a surface on which to stand a Bunsen burner or cut flowers in a vase of water, and allowing your gerbils to fornicate within its workings. Frankly, there ought to be graded electrical goods, some sold to geeks, some to grown-ups who eschew jargon but don’t need to be told the facts of life, and some to idiots. Naturally, I gravitate to Group B.

By now, my smarter readers will have intuited that my recent silence in these environs has been occasioned by PC purgatory. Actually, very specifically not PC. I am a Mac man, entranced around a decade ago by the newly launched iMac that seemed so cool and sleek and desirable. The thing served me well for a few years and was succeeded by a more recent model some three years ago. Perhaps because there is so much that is pleasing about the iMac, perhaps also because as I get older I get more sedentary, I surely spend the larger part of my waking hours in front of its screen, destroying my posture, worsening my RSI and further eroding my already compromised eyesight. My work and much of my communication, information and leisure activity resides in the iMac.

So being cut off from it is a big deal. The problem arose from a failure of the machine to accept or be able to read DVDs. This was a peripheral annoyance but I had stuff I wanted to burn onto DVD and I wanted my pound of flesh from my gizmo. So I bought a different brand of blank DVD, one that I was assured should be readily embraced by an iMac, but the problem persisted. A succession of friends now volunteered their services. Though of differing ages, they were united in being, to a degree, instinctive techies and/or mackies, able immediately upon being confronted with a computing problem to switch into that lateral thinking mode that utterly escapes me.

Not that they have yet been able to prevail. Acting on some strong advocacy, I bought a new external hard drive and loaded everything portable that lived in my iMac onto it, prior to conducting a reinstall of my system. The whole process anyway filled me with gloom, but the gloom turned to despair when the iMac started to react to the external hard drive as if it were a corrupted DVD and refused to recognise it. So I was cut off from all my stuff: it was inaccessible on an external hard drive that my iMac reckoned did not exist. Franz Kafka, thou shouldst be living at this hour.

Well, the successive pals wrestled. Eventually the external HD and the iMac began talking to each other again, sufficiently for me to be able to reload at least the important stuff onto the iMac whose restored operating system was, the while, taking on all the software updates that had been lost in the reinstall. During the course of this, one of my teacher-pals enunciated a rule for wrestling with one’s home computer: “try everything, especially when you know you’re completely right. Then try the opposite”.

Of course “try everything” can be a dangerous philosophy. I know enough to know that, when the iMac again refuses to recognise the external HD, as it is now again so refusing, I should not click on the button that allow me to “initialise” the HD because if I do I will lose everything on it. Meanwhile, my system is crashing and freezing rather more frequently than hitherto, and some programs have been tricky to reactivate – getting the desktop mailer to communicate fully with my mail server was a work of many hours – and others just require a lot of dull repetition to bring them back up to speed – for instance, while all the music stored on iTunes appears to be safely retained, none of my playlists that organise the material has survived, so I am having to rebuild those, track by track. And the original problem – the refusal to read DVDs – remains.

It is the sheer volume of time that all this consumes that is the most frustrating aspect, only bearable of course if at the end of it all I have a computer that bends to my will: we’re a ways off yet (if I may use an American expression). And of course I have not attempted since disaster struck to post a new blog entry until now. Only if you are reading this can you know that this part at least of my computing life still functions. If you are not reading this, it perhaps means that the issues remain and are still worse that I feared. Or, of course, you may be doing something altogether more nourishing. How could you ...