iAAAAAAAAARGH

This morning I had a few spare minutes, so I decided to clear a few songs out of my iPod. I start iTunes, and get the license agreement screen. Oh yeah, I updated that the other day with some other stuff, no problem. Click.

Freeze.

Force quit. THREE times before it actually quits.

Re-open iTunes. It's blank. Empty library, no playlists. "Old Playlist" files are blanked too.

Make the mistake of inserting my iPod to see if it's okay...it STARTS okay, but then iTunes decides I wanted it to be empty, and blanks everything.

All the music files are still there, and I brought 'em back into the library, but now I have to rebuild all the playlists and refill my iPod.

I am full of seething rage. Am I gonna have to back everything up to CDROM before installing iTunes updates, lest the update overwrite everything in some insane assumption that I don't actually want to listen to any music ripped before the update?

UPDATE: The "smart playlist" combined with the fact I downloaded all the album info for all but one of the discs I ripped let me reassemble the playlists pretty quickly, if not exactly the same as before. Then I assembled a playlist of what I wanted to stick on the iPod first, and set it to uploading in the background. Gonna re-rip the album I ripped prior to figuring out how to get info online rather than try to reassemble that playlist by hand.

Fantastic Four movie review

I'm still in a foul mood from the iPod thing, and a host of other Murphy's Law events this morning, and I don't think I'm going to be able to do anything useful until I expunge at least part of that mood. So I'll get out some of my ire by writing a review (and I've been pissed at all the negative reviews of FF, so I'm writing a POSITIVE review to vent. So there).

CAPSULE

Very tightly directed, good effects, largely competent acting. Far from Oscar-worthy (except maybe on technical stuff), but a fun movie. Recommended.

( Cut for spoilers! )

And there you have it. If you're not familiar with my usual rating scale, "Recommended" translates to about a B, or three stars out of four. It's not "OMGBBQ YOU GOTTA SEE THIS" good, but it's definitely "Find the time to see it in a theater" good.