MILES to GO || before I sleep

It's official: I need a new Trek icon. I didn't know how I'd feel about a new version of Kirk or Spock, but I ADORE them both (and just 'cause they both happen to be pretty hot...oh, and Uhura is too!). The movie kicked butt. People that don't know Trek will enjoy it; people that know Trek will love it; people that know Trek AND the pre-movie comic will rejoice in all the awesome references. Trek's version of time continuity is interesting, to say the least, but it means a whole new universe (multiverse? dimension?) of possibilities for rebooting the Trek franchise without trying to create some new story with characters that just don't "meet the bar" or surpass it.

Baba said it was too loud and Grandpa was complaining about how the movie broke several laws of physics. I love my grandparents, but sometimes I wonder if they forgot the meaning of "entertainment." Or maybe we just have different definitions.

Anyway.

I foolishly imported some new albums into iTunes a few days ago. This in itself wouldn't be a bad thing, except I'd opened iTunes before I connected my external hard drive, upon which my entire iTunes library is. Nothing would have seemed out of the usual except for some bizarre reason, even though I didn't start the imports until I was connected, the new imports did not go onto the external drive, but onto my laptop's hard drive, which I DO NOT want to use for music. I've got many, many gigs of music and I'd much rather they reside in an external and on my iPod where they can't (supposedly) be wiped willy-nilly.

So I deleted the folders from my hard disk thinking I could just re-import them and they'd go into their proper folder(s) on my external, but nooooo...somehow I managed to delete numerous other songs from my external drive! I contacted Apple and got a chunk of my purchased songs back, but not all of them, and in the case of a few, I don't know if they're the right "edition" (Explicit) or not! I suppose it's not that big of a deal, but I'm a big girl and I can handle swearing in my music.

It sucks that I'd pretty much have to re-buy those tracks that are missing from when I originally purchased them (yay for the iTunes Store magically losing songs so they can't let me redownload them?), but I was honestly thinking of shelling out the $60 to buy the DRM-free tracks, anyway. At least THEN I could have infinite copies lying around on CDs, DVDs, and on my external drive. Problem is: I don't have $60 to toss around on music, so I'm hoping to restore as many of the tracks on my own as possible.

I've been using Time Machine to see if I can restore some files, but the whole fiasco with my Time Machine drive not mounting due to heck-knows-what (Western Digital told me it could have been anything from a power surge to the fact that I hadn't plugged in my external TM drive to its own power source, vs. a surge protector!) means my TM data only goes back so far--say, to the beginning of the month. GRR!!! Backup could work, as it's been making incremental backups up to March (and I have no idea why it didn't during April or earlier this month, but I plan on resuming those backups as soon as I have most of my library restored), but it involves unpacking those compressed files, some of which have what I need, and some of which probably don't.

I tried "Stellar Phoenix," but the cost of actually restoring the files is crazy-- $129! A similar option (forgot the name of the application) is $89, but that's still a rip-off in my mind when I have two backup applications, two libraries, my iPod (which may have synced after the song disappearances, meaning it's NOT ON THERE), and a possible way of finding the files and re-associating them so they're not "dead" tracks in iTunes. It'll just take time and probably a lot of hope.

Wish me luck. And oh, if you have tips, they're totally appreciated.

 Where I Belong by Nobuo Uematsu from FINAL FANTASY VIII (Original Soundtrack) (Rating: 0)