| Tuesday, October 21, 2003 |
17:28 - My iPod, she is very sick
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I hooked my trusty old 5GB iPod onto my belt again for the first time in two months this morning-- after a long and intense tour of service as the boot drive for my copy of Panther that I was using for reference all this time.
It's really quite neat, in theory: the iPod is just an external FireWire drive, so you can plug it in to any Mac and boot off it. You can install Mac OS X onto it just like you can to any disk-- just select it in the OS installer screen. When the Mac boots, just hold down Option, and select the iPod from the bootable volumes. Very slick.
Well, except there are complications. First of all, it's not just a disk; it's also an iPod. Which means two things: 1) a Mac will treat it with special deference, launching iTunes every time you log in while it's plugged in (which, of course, it is-- it's booting off it). Yes, yes, I know I can turn this off-- but in the course of writing, I spent a lot of time doing nuke-and-pave installs and deleting and creating accounts. And of course each time you do that, your "Don't launch iTunes every damn time you log in with an iPod connected" setting gets reset.
And 2) the iPod itself is a computer-type device. It reboots into various modes, depending on what it's doing: player mode, or disk mode. It takes several seconds to do this. It boots into player mode unless there's a FireWire connection; if there is, and it successfully negotiates, it goes into disk mode (which can be mounted or unmounted, depending on what you've set it to do in iTunes). And you can't boot off the iPod unless it's booted into disk mode at the time you boot the computer.
If you cold-boot the computer, the iPod is in player mode. It has to reboot into disk mode as soon as it detects that the computer is powered-on on the other side of the FireWire cable. It can't do that in time, before the Mac has read your Option keypress and gone into the boot-volume-selector screen. If you reboot the computer at that stage, the power is interrupted (this is an iMac, and there's no Reset button-- just a power button), and the iPod reboots-- and again isn't ready in time. The only way you can do it is to boot off the Mac's internal disk, let the iPod mount itself in disk mode, then reboot so the power is uninterrupted and the iPod is ready in disk mode for you to select it.
And a litany of other very twitchy details that are of even less interest to anybody, I'm sure.
But it makes for good bragging rights-- it makes a Mac guy feel like a real geek again. Especially when I bring an ailing Cinema Display in to the Valley Fair Apple Store, and tell the guy at the Genius Bar that the thing died just as I was about to start writing the Displays chapter, and wasn't that just a kick in the teeth? We talked, and laughed, and I told him the story of what I'm in the middle of. I mentioned my travails of boot devices; I told him my iPod has spent the past two months as the boot drive for my iMac.
His face became a mask of shock. "You mean... it's been running this whole time?"
"Uh... yeah, pretty much. Why?"
"You know that voids your warranty," he says with real condolence in his voice. "The disk isn't designed for continuous duty." You get the sense that he was feeling the same sick churning in his gut that I suddenly had in mine.
I went home after work that night and un-slept the Mac. And as though the Genius had unlocked some mystical seal in the ether of Silicon Valley, suddenly the iPod would no longer stay booted. I could power-up the machine, it would boot all the way into Panther, auto-login, start to draw my desktop-- and then it would hang, mysteriously, the spinning beach-ball hypnotizing me into despair as I fought the urge to look at the iPod. And sure enough, there it was, its little square screen flashing with the intermittent Apple logo. It was in an endless boot cycle loop. The Mac never got a chance to read any data off it before the iPod crashed again and restarted, and hence the computer's own boot cycle stalled, and restarted, and stalled, and finally never came back at all.
It's at this stage that I thank the graven image of Jobs that sits over my headboard for the new feature in Panther that allows you to sync your iDisk through the use of a local cache copy. This encouraged me to use my iDisk all through the course of the writing-- I'd toss text files and screenshots into folders on the iDisk, and then it would sync those files in the background while I continued to work, staying out of my way CPU-wise and bandwidth-wise, instead of the way it would have worked in the past (requiring me to stop what I was doing while I uploaded files to the remote iDisk server every time I had a change to save). And the upshot was that my files were all safe, locked away in the data center in Cupertino; they didn't depend on my poor abused iPod to hold their battered selves, or to guard their precious contents while the iPod itself valiantly gave its life to the ravages of the elements, in the end shielding them stolidly with its corpse.
But no, they were all intact. I had to borrow Chris' external FireWire drive to finish the project-- ahh, a drive that doesn't think it's anything but a drive, and thus that you can boot off of without worrying about what mode it's booted into-- and the iPod lapsed into a deep, deep coma. It was only over the weekend, after finishing the final chapter submissions, that I administered the Kiss of Life that brought it back from the brink (by this stage, that entails cracking open the shell, peeling off the battery pack, unplugging the battery connector, waiting fifteen minutes, then plugging it back in and snapping it back together). And last night I plugged it into my G5 for the first time, deleted Panther off it, and shoveled in a new heap of songs.
On the way in to work this morning I started it playing. It valiantly launched into "One" by U2, but the right earbud was crackling; rotating the connector helped, but only barely. Nudging it would cause it to lose connection entirely. And I noticed that as it read songs off the disk, the entire LCD panel was flickering, dimly, the way a digital watch does when its battery is just about dead. If I could place my consciousness into the iPod and look out through its screen, I'm sure it would have looked like the Terminator's final sight as he descended into the molten metal tank, thumb raised confidently: static, a crackling image, numeric data fluttering across the margins, error messages scrolling past as it sings its heart out, chorus after chorus... then a darkening of the light source, a screenful of kernel-panic errors, the image freezing and restarting jerkily, as though under a strobe, then a snowy screen... and then nothing.
Not yet, though. It's still hanging on. It's still pulling out song after song that seems to uncannily fit my mood at a given moment. That right earbud seems to be a write-off, and other headphones don't help-- it's the iPod's socket. The battery is only holding a charge for a few hours at a time. With some nursing I might be able to bring it back, as I've done a number of times in the past. But it might be past the time for that.
This is an iPod whose two-year life has given me more enjoyment than any two years of most humans have given me. I couldn't in good conscience sell it; it's not in saleable condition. I could give it away, but it would gnaw at me for weeks, if not months-- I'd be sure it would give up in despair, refusing to play anything but shriek-metal as it frantically tried to call out to me; and then it would go dark, and not even the most gifted electrical engineer would be able to find out why.
I think maybe, when the time comes, I'll bury it. I'll remove the battery, compose the device with dignity, put it in its original display box, and find a quiet corner of the backyard for it.
... No! No... that's too far in the future. It can't die. It's got years left in it. I know it does.
First order of business-- give it its old name back. "BriPod". It's been "GastroPod" for the course of the writing, in the interest of anonymity. Time to give it its identity back, all the way. It's the first step in what will be a long, but ultimately successful, convalescence.
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Brian Tiemann
