Some People Have Real Problems*

iTunes hates me.
1st the backstory:
last week our 3 year old laptop decided we didn't need to use our USB ports anymore (thereby making us unable to hook up our iPods or the removable hard drive which housed our libraries and stephen's school work) and then decided to just up and die. on sunday we bought a new laptop (with twice the hard drive space, which eliminates the need for an external hard drive), which arrived yesterday.
(end backstory)

after almost a week and a half without access to iTunes**, i signed on last night and attempted to get the laptop and my iPod on the same page. i hooked up the external hard drive and got my library on the computer; everything seemed hunky dory.
THEN I hooked up my iPod and hit Sync. iTunes said it was syncing but my iPod just sat there saying “connected”. i stopped iTunes and hit Sync again, thinking something different would happen. it didn't. after about 15 minutes of this, I wound up manually moving my library onto the iPod. i waited a while and realized it was gonna take a few hours and went to bed, leaving it to run overnight.

8 hours later only 5200 of my 7100 songs were done (i stopped it in the middle of the P's because i had to get to work). i've lost all the volume adjustments i'd made, all my "smart" playlists, and all my star ratings (which fuel the playlists). a year after i bought the damn thing, i'm back to square one. the rumors of the capricious nature of iTunes was what made me balk at getting an iPod; no i know the rumors were true.

today is a Britney/Beyonce/Natasha Bedingfield kinda day.

*but not me.
**i'm one of those people who is constantly making and changing his iPod playlists, adding and removing music, adjusting sound levels, etc. conncurrently, last weekend, DJ John Michael gave me six CD's with new (for me, at least) music, including a sampler of the new PSB CD, which i've yet to be able to listen to.