Monday was a day of mourning in the Edmunds/Brown household. The Joshua Pod, my beloved 4G U2 special edition ipod, contracted the fatal bad folder screen. Despite the best efforts of doctors (ie me, who tried reformatting it in disk utility, restoring it with ipod updater, opening it and reseating all the connections, and in the end, smacking the snot out of it) it remained in it’s comatose state.

So I do some searching around online. Apple wanted $249 to repair it (replacing the hard drive.) Considering that a refurbished 5G with 30 gigs of space was going for $179 from them, this struck me as a little silly. Some more searching offered the advice that the best way to repair an ipod in such a condition was to be the Ike to it’s Tina (see above smacking comment) but that didn’t resolve the issue.

But more searching discovered the blog of Mr. Joshua (fitting name) Highland, and his instructions of replacing the hard drive of an afflicted ipod. A glimmer of hope. Another quick search turned up the 30gb version of the drive he had used in his own procedure, for $89. Thank you ebay.

The day after, I suffered instant paranoia. Would the drive fit? If so, will it work? If it does work, how well? (Apparantly doing this will usually fix yer pod, but will not let you use firewire any more, and a couple of the options within yer pod will no longer work.)

The drive arrived about an hour ago. Following Josh’s steps, I pried open TJP, and removed the drive. Pulled off the bumpers, shaved off the foam padding, and installed the new drive in it’s place. The Apple logo appeared, followed by the folder warning.

Uhoh.

I attached it to the G5 at work. The hard drive popped into life, and up popped iTunes. The ipod you have attached is fucked up. You need to restore it. Click here to continue, or use it as a coaster. We don’t care.

Lo and behold, it worked. After running the restore function, the ipod reset itself, and appeared happily in iTunes’ little window, hungry for some music. I gingerly dragged a song to it. Let go. Boink, no problem. Highlight a bunch of songs. Drag. Drop. No problem. I highlight 1,500 more. Drag. Drop. Is that all you got?!?!

I’m ecstatic. It’s alive again. I never realized how much of a slave I was to this thing, but four days without it had me twitching. Phew!

Used to being the operative word. I mean, I’m still riding to and from work (although not every day… like today, for example, since I’m staying late, and then going to the Zero 7 concert at the 9:30 Club. More like 3 times a week?) but I haven’t been on the trails since that fateful day at Rosaryville with Drew and Bukit. We’re talking almost two months.

Now, granted, Summer in DC tends to be uncooperative with being outside. Heat, humidity, and more mosquitos than you can shake a really big stick at. (I know. I’ve tried.) But more worrying is that… the urge to ride has faded off. A lot. This has been the topic of some worry in the back of my head when I do allow such thoughts to leak out. What the hell is going on? Why am I suddenly not doing something I really used to enjoy? Why don’t I enjoy it any more?!

Lo and behold, Drew raised the very same topic on the MORE boards a while back (there’s something else I don’t really do a lot of… hang out on there. Have I completely lost my interest in the sport?) citing that he’s going through the same thing. Granted, that’s more a case of “I haven’t ridden in two weeks” as opposed to two months. And today as I’m talking to Bukit on IM, seems he hasn’t been doing any non-commuting riding of late either. And even the mighty Jeff is doing it too – riding to and from work, but hasn’t been out on the Turner in a while.

So is it commuting that’s causing this? Are we starting to equate being on a bike with business instead of pleasure? Is it the fact that we’ve all got lives outside of riding, and are starting to shift priorities? Is the DC summer so oppressive that we all collectively (subconsciously) just avoid riding in July and August? A mixture of all of the above?

Whatever it is, it bugs the snot out of me that a beast of a bike is sitting in my hallway unused. The weather is cooling down, and I need to get back out there.

Otherwise, the terrorists win.