Concern

While I do feel very flattered that you think I have a wealth of knowledge that you can tap, please realize that:

1. Trivial, silly questions that you could probably research on Google are not an effective use of my time.
2. This especially true if I appear intensely focused on my computer, and have headphones on.

Seriously, knock that shit off. Are you all somehow offended that I want to sit in my bubble of productivity for brief periods during the day?

OK, so not all of my iTunes songs were in the trash. A lot of them were plain deleted.

But never fear: I had everything on my iPod.

Until I plugged it into my laptop and iTunes erased a bunch of the songs from it.

Remember, I’m sequencing your fucking genome, bitches.

You have your laptop at work, and got a new iPhone. Your phone is synced with your desktop computer, which you never use directly anymore, you just use it as a media server via iTunes, so you decide to move your iPhone to sync to your laptop instead. You have “Back to my Mac,” and you connect to your desktop that’s in Santa Cruz through it.

You clicked on “Drobo” by accident, instead of “Macintosh HD,” which mounted that volume. “Drobo” is your Drobo drive, which holds all of your iTunes music; note that BTMM mounts this remote drive as /Volumes/Drobo, which is the same mount point on the desktop.

The recipe for moving an iPhone to a new Mac is roughly this:

1. Close iTunes on both computers.
2. Copy the metadata files from ~/Music/iTunes from your old mac to your new mac. This means shit like iTunes Music Library.xml.
3. Copy the files ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.iTunes*.plist from your old mac to your new mac.
4. Launch iTunes on the new mac, sync the phone, back it up, etc.

That worked fine, and I was able to sync and backup my old iPhone, and then restored my iPhone data to my brand-new iPhone. But, since I used my (more than 5500 song) other iTunes library to do this, the version of iTunes on my laptop had references to all these songs that are on the wrong computer. So I went and deleted them all, puzzled by how long it was took. I even hit "delete files" instead of "keep files," because heck, the files weren't even there on my laptop.

But remember, via Back to my Mac, the drive with all my music on it was mounted as a network drive. With the same mount point as on my desktop.

This means that I deleted my entire iTunes music library, over the Internet.

All the files are in the trash on my desktop computer, but now I get to restore them all.

You might assume that someone savvy and smart with computers would never fuck anything up, but no, the opposite is true: the savvier and smarter you are with computers, the more spectacularly you fuck things up.

The biggest comfort is that it’s out of my control, and it’s not so much my fault.

I was considering the idea of a kind of Drake equation for dating and romance, prompted by a recent episode of This American Life. You take the population of where you live, and start taking away percentages of people that won’t fit you romantically, and you’re finally left with a really shockingly small number of people you could have a serious relationship with.

• The population of Santa Cruz, CA, is about 58,000 as of 2008. [1]
• Of these, roughly 50% are women (which matches my tastes), leaving 29,000.
• Of these, 32.6% are between the ages of 25 and 34, using data from 2000, leaving 9,454 [2]. This part of the sieve happily gets rid of the UCSC undergrad population almost entirely, so we at least won’t have to do that cut below.
• 13% of people in Santa Cruz are married. This might be a low estimate, since women in this age group are the most likely to be married, and since that number indicates just the number who live with a spouse. This leaves 8,225. [ibid]
• Assume half of these people are in serious, committed relationships, and aren’t interested in a new relationship in the near future. 4,113.
• About 46% of people in Santa Cruz had “some college” in 2000. Assuming that this is a good indicator of someone intelligent enough that I could be interested in, this leaves 1,905 [3].
• Now, getting into something I’m pulling out of my ass, assume that I’d find one in ten of this remaining group “attractive,” and that their personality would match what I’m looking for in a long-term relationship. 190.
• Now assume that one in ten of those women would find me equally attractive (yes, this is a seriously, seriously, seriously optimistic estimate, I think; I have pretty strong evidence that I’m not attractive, but we’ll play along with our 0.1 estimate). That’s 19.

Nine. Teen.

So, 0.03% of all the people in Santa Cruz are even potential matches, or about 1 in 3,000. If I met one new person a week, every week — which really doesn’t happen, since I pretty much see the same people over and over — I’d have even odds (50/50) of meeting one of them in four years. I never even go on any dates, so it’s not even like I’m trying out anyone I’d be meeting.

Now, Santa Cruz is a relatively small town, and things get a little better if we go outside it. San Francisco has about 15 times the population of Santa Cruz, so if I moved there the potential pool would jump to 285, and maybe I could meet more new people every week. It’s still grim. And lonely.

Edited 2009-02-18 @20:05 to add: yeah, OK, who am I kidding? The reverse attraction rate would be more like 1 in 100 women who would find me attractive. If that. So in all of Santa Cruz, there is one, maybe two, women who I have any potential with.

This test script will fail about half the time on Mac OS X, both 10.5.1 and 10.4.11. Note that the second test (the “FAIL2″) never seems to fail.

#!/bin/bash

mkdir test
dd if=/dev/random of=test/file1.txt bs=1024 count=5 > /dev/null 2> /dev/null
cp test/file1.txt test/file2.txt
cp test/file1.txt test/file3.txt
cp test/file1.txt test/file4.txt
cp test/file1.txt test/file5.txt
cp test/file1.txt test/file6.txt
cp test/file1.txt test/file7.txt
mkdir test/subdir
cp test/file*txt test/subdir

zip -0 -q -r - test > f1
cat f1 | ditto -xk - .1

zip -0 -q -r - test | cat > f2
cat f2 | ditto -xk - .2

diff -r .1 .2 > /dev/null
if test $? != "0"; then echo "FAIL"; fi

ditto -xk f2 .3
diff -r .1 .3
if test $? != "0"; then echo "FAIL2"; fi

rm -rf f1 f2 .1 .2 .3 test


I’m not such which sucks worse: the fact that ditto can’t handle what is apparently a perfectly valid zip file, or that zip writes something different to stdout, depending on whether or not it is a pipe or a file.