Pyrogenic

I was stressing out over my photo library. It seemed like Aperture had lost track of thousands of photos. I was so confused I went to the Apple store to get help, and they managed to help me with one problem, but that only solved the mystery of a few of the missing photos. The remainder, Aperture was convinced, were located on a volume called "NIKON D80." This led the Apple store guy to suggest I'd erroneously "imported" all those images off my camera without actually moving them off my camera which I found inconceivable and horrifying. But truly when I searched every drive I had for those filenames I continually came up empty. Then this weekend I fired up my old Mac on the off chance that these images were somehow hiding on a drive I'd never copied. Know what? I found some of them, buried in iPhoto libraries. I thought I'd solved the mystery and joyously began copying things around, making space, and trying to convince Aperture I'd found the missing images. It wouldn't believe me, and despite crazy manipulations with symlinks, loopback filesystems, voodoo dances, (and Aperture mysteriously crashing when I tried to reconnect certain images,) I thought I was going crazy. And then I noticed that SOME of the directories from inside those projects were STILL missing. I noticed almost all the problematic projects were imported iPhoto projects and wondered if there was a problem specifically with them. I was right! I finally realized where the images really were: on another drive, in a directory full of iPhoto libraries that Spotlight doesn't search inside of. (I'd used unix tools on my old Mac since I couldn't use Screen Sharing on the old OS.) The other thing that threw me is Aperture's schizophrenic way of treating iPhoto projects: it gives the "real" OS path of files in some places and the "iPhoto" path (involving event names and rolls) in others, and that is what breaks reconnect.

Unfortunately, I'd left that hard drive connected to my computer at work. (It has my music on it.) Ludicrous chains of technology to the rescue!

Portable Hard Drive (MEMEX)
|
(FireWire)
|
\|/
Work Computer
|
(SMB over Cisco VPN)
(IP obtained via RDC under Windows under BootCamp)
(OSX apparently doesn't support Active Directory)
|
\|/
Mounted as /Volumes/MEMEX
|
(loopback fs via MacFUSE)
|
\|/
Mounted as /Volumes/NIKON D80

With this setup, rebuilding the Aperture library (command-option as it loads) magically reconnected every missing file that was left, as far as I can tell.

I still don't know how it decided these libraries were on "NIKON D80" or how I can convince it otherwise so I don't have to execute

cd /Users/josh/Projects/macfuse-read-only/filesystems/loopback
mkdir /Volumes/NIKON\ D80
sudo ./loopback /Volumes/NIKON\ D80 \
	-omodules=threadid:subdir,subdir=/Volumes/MEMEX \
	-oallow_other,native_xattr,volname=NIKON\ D80

before starting Aperture.

On a side note, I discovered a ton of photos I never imported and lots of old documents I never pulled off of my old Mac! Should be fun to sift through later.

I checked today: my Xbox has 166 downloaded tracks for Rock Band. That’s something in the neighborhood of $250 worth of DLC. Cheap given the amount of awesome, but still a dramatic figure. (Plus, uh, 80 or so for RB2 and 50 or so from RB, that’s about 300 tracks total. RB3 better have the ability to save playlists and mark favorites.)

Relatively recent acquisitions include Rio and Girls On Film — I figure those have dr_memory’s name on them. Others (like Belly and Screaming Trees) hearken back to my teenage years. There’s some more Journey, Stone Roses, Soundgarden, The Shins, the entire Texas Flood album, a bunch of Franz Ferdinand including Take Me Out, and Emily’s pick of the day: Smooth Criminal (the A.A.F. version).

We should play again soon.

(Oh, on a side note, listen to Danger Mouse’s new album!)

You should, too, seeing as how it is maybe going under.

http://hewgill.com/ljdump/

Remove any extended unicode characters from your userpic tags before running.

This amazing Friday night I sat on my roof, looking at the flickering lights of the bay bridge, and wondered, what ever happened to Debbie? Isn't it odd that what I thought was the best of my [3] blind dates, from movie to her pad to diner to mine, [where there was rock band (sorry, Emily) and cuddling at 2:30am] would fade into memory like the passing of any other uneventful evening? Would this be a simple lesson of, as a later date was quick to affirm, "when she offers you her number, take it, even if you're freezing [huddled in the blustery 4:30am cold of Mission St walking her to her car] and she already has your card?" Or perhaps I was taken: all her actions were simply further machinations to collect the best possible content for her still-in-progress article? [If so, look for me in SF Magazine!] Regardless, the faintly flickering lights of the bridge both our roofs look upon brought her to mind, and that mind wants to know: what ever happened to Debbie?