Then there was music (and wonderful roses)

The iPod situation is fixed, and I'm plugged in this very moment listening to my music collection on random play.

This came about after spending over an hour and a half on hold to Apple's technical support at national rate while Enya was played at me. I'm pretty sure they make an attempt to select calm and soothing music to subdue you, and avoid the prospect of you exploding once you actually manage to talk to someone. The main effect it had on me, however, was a soporific one, and after an hour I was finding it increasingly difficult to remember why I was phoning them.

The good news was that my problem was solved within ten seconds of talking to someone: iPods can't be used with USB2.0 ports if you have Windows Me. The bad news, and the annoying thing (other than the actual content of the bad news), was that this isn't mentioned anywhere on Apple's website, on the iPod box, literature, or in any of the information that came with the iPod dock connector to USB2.0 cable that we had to buy especially for this purpose since we didn't have a FireWire card in our computer. We've asked for a refund; whether we'll get one or not remains to be seen.

Anyway, the problem was solved by my dad popping out to buy a FireWire card which was duly installed, hence all the music currently on the iPod. The only irritation is that, due to the snazziness of the Browse and the Shuffle functions (you can set it to shuffle albums rather than songs), I now have to go back through all of my files to add in the album field in the ID3 tag - in the past I have stripped out all fields other than title and artist. Gah. Still, there's only 1000 or so files; shouldn't take too long.