iChina syndrome

(Warning: this post contains geek language and may not be suitable for all readers, except perhaps as a treatment for insomnia)

I write this on a spiffy new iMac at the Apple Store in Stonestown, where in 90 minutes I have an appointment at the Genius Bar. To say that my computer is having a meltdown apparently doesn't do the situation justice. My inner life right now can best be compared to the look on Jack Lemmon's face in China Syndrome when he has grasped the gravity of the problem eating through his nuclear reactor. Nobody does crestfallen like Jack in a nuclear control room. But I am giving him a run for his money.

The problems started after I shot some video with my new Casio Exilim Z850 camera, a nifty little 8 megapixel device that takes primo quality video for a camera its size (imagine six credit cards rubber banded together). I found that my Mac couldn't actually read the AVI video files the camera produced, so I called B&H Photo Video in New York, where I bought the camera because they were the only ones who had it in stock and because shopping at B&H is good for the Jews. They directed me to Casio for the correct driver that would let the Mac play AVI. I did this, and successfully played a few videos, and that, I thought, was that.

The next day I opened up an old video project that I need to edit and burn to a DVD in order to apply for a MacDowell Colony fellowship (they require two separate video submissions). I'd ediited this movie in two weeks for the September memorial for a friend who'd died in June at the age of 91 and who had had a colorful and fairly distinguished career as a journalist in print and on public TV. I'd done four separate interviews in the four years prior to his death, and the result was good. The movie's provisionally called "Paleojournalist: News from the Life of George Dusheck."

I made good progress editing the video on Friday, identifying half a dozen clips I could part with without derranging the narrative, and I found a nifty image online of Fred Friendly to add when George mentions him as having funded KQED's Newsroom show, which was George's last gig. When I tried to add a transparent "Fred Friendly" title over his image, because George spaced out his name in the middle of the story as 91 year olds are permitted to do, I started running into trouble: following the image, Final Cut Pro played the right video and the right audio, but when I paused on the clip it displayed a still image from elsewhere in the movie. I restarted the application several times and always got the same results, with occasional new eccentricities, like the timeline icon showing the wrong video.

After doing some obvious things like throwing away preferences and POA cache and verifying and repairing permissions, I called Apple. That's why I paid $349 for AppleCare. After an hour troubleshooting on the phone, the guy at Apple suggested I resinstall my OS. I did this. Anomalies persisted: In the finder, I tried to revise an in-progress file search and, failing, opened up a new search window. The two windows vibrated back and forth, with a hideous clicking sound emanating from the CPU, until I did a hard shut-down.

On restart, Final Cut Pro showed the wrong thumbnail image to the clip after the Friendly image. First this was only when the movie was paused, but then the wrong video took over the whole clip. The correct audio played under the wrong video. Delightful!

I remembered I was supposed to upgrade my software from OS 10.3.4 from the install disk to 10.3.9 via Software Update. I did this, restarted. I repaired permissions, verified the disk, threw away (again) three FCP preferences and POA cache files. I emptied the trash (which I'd neglected to do before).

After this upgrade , Photoshop wouldn't let me add text to a TIFF image without turning the whole image red in the process. And then it wouldn't let me edit the text, or add a new layer.

FCP retained "media offline" timeline thumbnails in Paleojournalist from a previous start-up when I didn't have my external hard drive connected. This persisted after restarting the application.

On restarting the computer, ALL the thumbs said "media offline." This varied when I shrunk and expanded the timeline, but the "offline" icons never went away entirely. This willfully bizarre problem persisted even after I restored the project to a previous version (too bad about all that lost work) and after I reinstalled the FCP HD softtware.

The Finder wouldn't open Dreamweaver. It seemed like it was doing it, but gave up after a few seconds and withdrew it from the dock. Other options in the left hand column of the finder were inaccessible.

So this morning, after a mostly sleepless night until a Klonopin intervention that let me sleep but didn't exactly tone down my bloodstained AM nightmares, I called Apple again. Apple Suport guy #2 created a test account and determined that the problems weren't in my account. We started the computer from the installer disk (hold down C during start-up) and verified permissions, repaired permissions, verified disk (no problem!)

After this solved nothing, Apple guy #2 went away for five minutes and he asked if I had added any internal hardware (I hadn't). After another few minutes, he came back and started up the computer in Safe Mode, opting not to preserve my settings. Then he abandoned me to my computer, which, once it restarted, showed no recognition of any of my data (though the disk is full enough to suggest it is still there) and no recognition of my original account. Perhaps more significantly, after I spent 20 minutes on the phone with AT&T's SBC Internet Services tech support, I learned that while I was online enough to use iChat, I couldn't open a Safari window.

Apple Support guy #3 was concerned enough about the apparently accelerating corruption of my data that he said he was transferring me to a back-up specialist, who would help me back up my data before proceeding with our troubleshooting adventure. The thing is, he explained, it sounds like the computer is continuing to degrade information: applications, movie files, etc. This is what I spent half the night awake fearing--two weeks before I leave on festival tour, HAL has scrambled my movies like so many silicon eggs--and it was almost comforting to hear the anxiety half confirmed by a professional. My movie, possibly both my movies, are destroyed after three years' work. What a relief.

Apple Support guy #4 (the back-up specialist) said my situation sounded so dire that he was making me an appointment at an Apple Genius Bar so that someone could actually put his hands on my radioactive computer, and here at the Stonestown Apple Store Genius Bar is where I find myself now, 45 minutes early. Originally I was 90 minutes early, because the SF State library, where I was going to track down the book "The Technique of My Musical Language," by Olivier Messiaen, exists in four copies, as opposed to one $70 volume on Amazon and zero available copies at the SFPL or the UCB library. SFSU, unfortunately for me, is closed this weekend for its spring break. I'm sure that information was online when I checked for weekend hours the other day, but it escaped me.

Worst case scenario with respect to my movies is pretty bad, but it's not a complete loss of either one. It's a loss of weeks and months of work. For Apparition, I have a fairly recent project file backed up on Gmail. Even if all my data on the external hard drive is corrupted (as the Paleojournalist data appears to be), there is supposed to be some way that I can use the project file to automatically cue the tapes to re-import the clips. And the truth is that now that I know how Paleojournalist goes, I could reconstruct it from the original tapes in a matter of days if I had working software and hardware, which seems to be a lot to ask of the Universe right now.

I thought I had just about enough time to get everything done before my April 15 departure for Berlin/Aarhus/Nashville/Indianapolis/San Francisco/Santa Cruz. Now it looks like I just have to work four times as fast and three times as long to get it done. Anyone know where I can score some ProVigil?