I think I got it working. I tried about a million different things that were suggested in the Mac support iPod forums. Some things worked for some people but not others.

If someone else has the problem, let me know and I'll post all the differnt things I did. Otherwise I prefer not to use the brainpower it'll take to articulate all the steps I took.

Am now waiting for 6878 songs to be (re)copied to the iPod. Poor Kaylee - had her memory wiped....

eta: there's at least 20 threads on the Mac support site dealing with this issue - it appears that a lot of people were affected, and many do not have the problem resolved yet.

So my sister's computer appears to have died. It's kinda old anyway, with a mishmash of programs and a version of WinXP my brother put on it last year that didn't take very well.

Now when you try to start it, it looks like it's trying to boot, but doesn't (either off the C: drive or off the WinXP disk), and instead merely emits unhappy beeps with no information on the monitor.

Frankly, I think it's basically a loss, and since it was free, she's not too upset. Their Quicken and email files are all backed up online, so it's not like they're losing anything.

I offered to help them find a good deal on a new computer. Anyone have any suggestions? They don't need a video or sound card, really -- they just need something sturdy and reliable for regular household use -- email, surfing, kids doing homework. Where do I look?

Quick linux question:

I'm in a shell account. I want to make a copy of a directory and all its files under a different directory name. e.g. I want to take all the files under directory jonb, and back them up to a new directory jonb1. How do I do that quickly?

cp -a jonb jonb1

Thanks Tom! Does jonb1 have to exist first?

t edit never mind. I just tried it without an mkdir first and it worked great. You're a peach!

Consuela, CompUsa has some good sales ending today.

Repeating Guided Setup on the Tivo finally worked -- the Tivo wasn't happy with the Vonage phone line, so we plugged it into the wall jack (good thing our phone service doesn't shut off until Monday!) and it reset itself swimmingly.

Jessica, Vonage might appreciate some feedback from you about that.

Oh, good idea. I'll shoot them an email.

(So far, this is the only glitch we've had -- I was worried about the reception at first, but it's been great. And I love getting my voicemails emailed to me!)

Yeah, so far Vonage has been working pretty well for me too. I also adore getting my voicemails in my email, it's really nice.