Well, folks, I really wanted to post another episode of Cherry-flavored Pez last night, but that didn’t happen, as you can tell.

Last night, I got home, started up the Mac, started up GarageBand, and realized that none of my loops were there. WTH?

As it turns out, I had done something terribly wrong to my Macintosh some time ago. When I first got this Mac Mini, some six or seven years ago, the hard drive on it seemed terribly huge. Of course, that was when I was mostly creating and editing text files and the odd .jpg. Now I have audio and video files all over the place and it seems miniscule. So I decided to clean up the hard drive a bit, and went through the System folder and took out a bunch of stuff that seemed to have no purpose.

Not long after that, I started getting the Mac equivalent of the blue screen of death: the screen would freeze, and an attractively designed black box with grey text would announce (in English, German, Japanese, and Spanish) that I had to restart my Mac and gave me directions for doing so.

I only got high-speed internet in October, so I thought that maybe I had finally beaten the odds and contracted a Mac virus (why can’t I beat the odds when playing the lottery, ay?), but when I looked into it, I found out that my little Mac friend was suffering from something called “kernal failure.” Yeah, I know, it sounds like a postmodern pop band out of Pawtucket, but apparently this is a real thing. As I read, I discovered that this is sometimes caused by a mechanical error, but more often it is caused by some nimrod digging into the System folder and moving or deleting stuff. It’s not enough just to put things back the way they were, because that just won’t work. You have to reinstall the system software.

On Thursday morning, I did just that. Then I had to update the software that I had just installed. (Remember, this computer is six or seven years old.) Because it’s so old, I had to update the updates, and then update the latest update. Sometimes I had to restart, sometimes I could just go on to the next update. In the end, it took about three hours to return everything to normal. Just to celebrate, I left the computer on for as long as I could and never once received the Mac equivalent of the blue screen of death.

Alas, all this work pretty much left me at a “zero state” as if I were just taking this thing out of the box the first time. Any customizations I had made to programs I use every day were just gone. Keep in mind that I had started using most of these programs several years ago and several million brain cells ago, and I don’t remember every single tweak that I’ve made over the years.

This is actually a good thing, because most of the tweaks I made were to cover up my ignorance about using these programs, so most of these tweaks were workarounds for easy ways to do things that I didn’t know existed. Not a bad thing at all, because it kind of clears all the clutter out.

Except when it comes go GarageBand, because all of my loops were missing, and I don’t remember how I got a hold of all those loops in the first place. I’ll figure it out eventually. I mean, I figured it out once, and without high-speed internet access, which means that all the discs I need are around here somewhere. If anything, it’s a real learning experience. The only problem is that there is no podcast tonight.

Maybe that’s just karma at work. Maybe what I wanted to say wasn’t all that interesting. Who knows? If I stay up all night to figure this out, then I should have the whole thing going by Sunday morning. Fingers crossed, folks, fingers crossed.

Needless to say, I eventually figured this out, but by that point I needed sleep more than I needed to make a podcast. So just sit tight, and we’ll see how soon I get around to this. Fingers crossed.

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