I For One Welcome Our New Apple Overlords

Yesterday we finally got OS 5 downloaded to Precocious Daughter's iPod Touch. Because that is the most important thing in the world.


By the way, there was a terrible earthquake in eastern Turkey today.
Please contact the Red Cross/Red Crescent if you want to help.

 As you may have read earlier, we had some difficulty with this task. Just plug your iPod Touch into the computer, and it will automatically prompt you to download, said Apple's website in that smug tone it adopts when addressing people who are so uncool that they don't have Steve Jobs' directives beamed straight to their brains and have to do something as gauche as consult a website. I don't really understand my hostility toward Apple.


Except the Beatles had it first, and you didn't have to
buy their equipment to listen to the music.

 Oh, and also this. The culprit ended up being the USB cable. PDaughter has two cables for her iPod Touch. One came with it, and one came with the not-Apple-brand wall charger I bought her. The charger is basically a USB-to-outlet adapter; you plug it in the wall socket, plug the USB end of the iPod Touch cable into the USB port in the adapter, and plug the other end into the device. So simple a PC user can do it.

The charger came with its own cable, and it works great for charging. So when it came time to upgrade the OS, PDaughter grabbed the nearest cable, which happened to be the one manufactured by the fine folks at Dynex and not the Apple one, and plugged it in to the computer. And nothing happened. Except that I got really pissed off and lost half a candy bar to the dog.


This message is brought to you by the dog.

 Yesterday we tried again. And the anger was a-bubblin' up as that goddamned hunk of technology failed to perform. Yes, it was the technology, not the users. You can take your PEBCAK errors and shove them in a free memory slot.


Also, I reject your reality and substitute my own.

 In desperation, I finally told PDaughter to fetch her other, Apple-approved cable. Because it seemed like the least likely thing to work, which is almost always my go-to strategy for solving problems. And it came through for me once again. With the hive-sanctioned cable in place, suddenly the iPod Touch couldn't download its shiny new OS fast enough. I think it was singing a hymn to Steve Jobs as it did so.

So my takeaway is this. Don't try to screw Apple out of its filthy lucre by purchasing off-brand peripherals. The collective knows and will take steps to protect itself from interlopers. In fact, the collective knows everything. While I was writing this, iTunes spontaneously launched and took over my computer. I am totally not making this up. The iPod Touch wasn't even connected. I think it sensed that its overlords were being invoked in a negative light and awoke to seek out the source of the disturbance. I'm very afraid.

If you need me, I'll be in Room 101 being reprogrammed. And playing Scramble on the iPod Touch, thanks to the strong, benevolent, and doubleplusgood innovators at Apple, Inc.