Oy! I get to the computer bright and early this morning, and what do I see? A blue screen! Well, perhaps not the fabled nightmare blue screen, the message from the beyond that used to mean:”Fun’s over — you’ll be out of commission for a week at least.” No, it was just the “HP Invent” screen that comes on when I reboot. The machine was stuck there. I had no idea why. Why I had no idea why is the actual mystery.

After a bit of poking and restarting and whatnot, I finally gave up and went to work on the laptop. Which was a drag, but I could manage; I’d just have to download all recent images from my camera, so that I could use the image above (a shopwindow on 57th Street). Drat — I didn’t have an extra cable. When I came back in to fetch the cable from the stalled computer, it was entangled with the iPod cable. Before unraveling them, I detached the new Nano that I was setting up late last night.

You know what’s going to happen next; you know how these fairy tales work. You saw the fatal words, the new Nano that I was setting up late last night. What a world of mischief there is in attempts to set things up late at night!

I detached the new Nano, and the computer sprang to life. Here’s what appears to have happened: in the middle of the night, Microsoft updated the Internet Explorer browser. When the computer was instructed to reboot, it got stuck when it couldn’t decide what the iPod was doing there.

***

It reminded me of the days when something like that happened at least once a week. Even without my help. But, d’you know what? I don’t want to think about the old days. The old days were terrible. The present day isn’t all that great, really, but it’s things are a hell of a lot more dependable.

That said, I long to be free of WordPress. Which is probably why I don’t want to remember the bad old days. Things are tough enough as it is.  

***

Without the computer snafu, I don’t know what I’d have written about first thing this morning. Every spare moment yesterday went to reading The Vault.  This involved long stretches of poring over the A-Z(ed) and reacquainting myself with the roadways of St John’s Wood, a part of London that I’ve never been to.

I have to re-read A Sight for Sore Eyes now. There was no need to search the Internet to establish a connection between the two books; the dust jacket of The Vault plainly announces it — on the back, the part that I never read. Here’s how firmly I ignore the puffery on the backs of novels: I was astonished, one time, to learn that the friend with whom I was discussing a book had himself written a blurb for it, which indeed appeared on the dust jacket. That was a bit embarrassing.

What drove me crazy about not having A Sight for Sore Eyes to hand yesterday was trying to remember how Teddy Brex, the hero/villain of the piece, wound up in the coal pit at the end. That’s of course what stuck in my mind about the book: the horrible end of Teddy Brex. Happily, Ruth Rendell dropped enough hints throughout The Vault to jog my recollection, and the answer came to me just a few pages before Wexford slipped on the wet leaves of Virginia creeper in the yard of Orcadia Cottage and figured it out.

***

The new Nano is tiny, barely larger than a postage stamp, less than half the size of the one that it’s to replace. It’s probably the last Nano that I shall ever buy. My next purchase will be another classic iPod. I will put all of my playlists on that one, or as many as will fit.

I now have two distinct music systems. Each room has its own stereo setup, with DVD/CD player, amplifier, and reasonably good speakers. Each of these has an iPod dock as well, so that an iTunes playlist can be played in one room with really good sound. The other system is a network of three Klipsch players, no longer manufactured, that connect wirelessly. The connection is not very reliable, and on Sundays it tends to break up with annoying frequency; there must be some sort of interference from cellphones or other devices. But this is the system, for all it’s faults, that’s usually playing, because it provides the background music that lubricates my movements from room to room.

I could, of course, stick a Nano in my pocket and wear headsets; that’s what young people do. I wonder if they’ll still rely on headsets when they get to be my age. There comes a point when you’re no longer comfortable in that bubble of sound, any more than you would be if, wherever you looked, all you could see was a movie projected onto your eyeglasses. There is also the faint absurdity of private music in a private home with only one person in residence. The playlists that I feed through the Klipsch system have also been designed not to bother Kathleen — no booming requiems or arresting rhythmic irregularities. The background music is an important part of the apartment’s look and feel. 

Someday, in better times, it will a lot easier than it is now to compile playlists of classical music. iTunes isn’t designed for it, not at all. If there is an app for classical-music library management, I’ve never heard of of it. Who would use it, besides me an perhaps a thousand other people on earth? But that’s what better times will bring: powerful apps that are easily created and tailored to one user’s needs.

As distinct from the “better times” in which everyone learns to be happy with the same handful of resources. The better times of Idiocracy.

Drop me a line at rjk@dailyblague.com
This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 21st, 2012 at 8:00 am.