happiness is a hardware failure

I was able to churn out several copies of "Paleojournalist" and print labels for them. Then I worked up the courage to open Apparition of the Eternal Church, and all hell broke loose. All the chapter markers were in the wrong places, and, worst, when I tried to export a copy as a QuickTime movie (the requisite step for producing a DVD), I got the obtuse, obscure and awful error message "General Error." I feel like that should be my geek drag name, at least this week.

The good news is that when I described the history of this sorry period of technical failure to Apple Support guy #7, he immediately came to the conclusion that it was a hardware failure. If I'd done not only two Archive & Installs but an Erase & Install, and I'd heard that outrageous clicking sound during the battle of the search fields, there was no other logical explanation. So he made me a second appointment at the Genius Bar at Stonestown, where I'm writing this on a football field-sized monitor hooked up to a Power Mac G5 with Dual-core 2GH PowerPC G5s. The thing about that much computer is that it can render your video edits on the fly. You don't look sufficiently impressed.

But the really good news is that my movie plays, and exports to QuickTime, just fine on this computer. General Error has left the theater of war. And that means that my files actually aren't corrupted. My movie is safe, and I'm actually on track to have a version of it ready to export and take with me before they toss me out of here at nine.