A day for repair (day 217)

Full blown cold now.  I haven't had a cold since September 08 so I'm not super resentful.  It's gotta rain sometime.  At least the four day weekend means I get to rest as much as I need to. 

I spent a large part of the day reconstituting a corrupted iTunes library file.  I'm not sure how it got corrupted but I don't recommend using Apple's method for fixing a library file.  It made things worse, renaming my files randomly to other song titles.  I ended up making a new library file (hint: press the Option key when starting iTunes) and reloading everything which means I lost all my playlists.  It's still moving files around.  The upshot is that if this ever happens again I'll have a backup.  I lost a few music files as I was rejigging everything but probably no more than 3 or 4.  At least I think so.  Who knows what was going on as I was moving things around.  It's a lot of wasted time on a problem that spontaneously appeared from iTunes.  I think it does not like having a library file stored on a NAS.  If the NAS is unavailable for whatever reason it automatically resets the media folder which I think is partially why the library file is getting corrupted.

I'm still really enjoying listening to the "You are not a gadget" audio book.  I agree with some of his points so far but it's hard to be as convinced as he is that web 2.0 is the wrong direction when I see so many great things that have come about because of it.  Still, I'm willing to suspend disbelief for a little while and see if I can glean a future that could be different but still have some of the same advantages.  I do agree with him about the insanity of the Singularity movement -- people that believe we'll be able to upload ourselves to the machine.  He had some interesting thought experiments about consciousness having to do with simulating brain processes.  Lately I've heard many people talk about how central the brain is to consciousness.  I don't dispute that but somehow I don't think that's the whole picture.  The assumption seems to be that everything else is easy to simulate or replicate.  It seems like a step backward to reduce consciousness to one of our organs.  I'm only on chapter 3 of 14 so I'll keep reporting here as I absorb what he's saying.

bacterial update:  I'm about to bottle another batch of kombucha.  The baby scoby on this batch formed amazingly well and healthy.  I have no idea why.  Three things were different than my other batches: 1. I used half evaporated cane juice because I ran out of white sugar; 2. I started with room temperature tea instead of warm. 3. I inadvertently made stronger tea.  This time I'm using a different kind of evaporated cane juice (not as brown) and starting with slightly warm tea.  I can't seem to be totally consistent but the process seems to allow some flexibility.  The vanilla secondary fermentation I did last time turned out very well if you like cream soda.  I'm not a huge fan so I probably won't try it again.  I still don't have chrysanthemum.  The weather was a little too crazy today to get outside and shop.

A song for this post.