I’m putting a stake in the ground, and listing the stuff I need, and things I need to do in 2012. This is my official running list. Better get my list done now, so I know what to work towards.

Now in no particular order, the shit I need to get done:

1. Replace my desk with a custom IKEA desk.
2. Replace my Dell 19″ 1905FP monitor with the Dell 24″ U2412. Yup, just swapping Dells.
3. Replace our Epson scanner with something newer and compatible with Windows 7.
4. Replace our Logitech webcam with something newer and compatible with Windows 7, and does HD video.
5. Get an iPad 2, or an iPad 3. Hell, how about one of each?
6. Clean out our basement, and fix it up as a playroom for our kids, or when other kids come over. This will require new carpeting and a fresh coat of paint.
7. Replace the toilet flangey-thing in the hallway powder room so that it isn’t slowly leaking.
8. Paint the kitchen.
9. Clean out my side of the walk-in closet. I found some shirts in there that are late 90′s era. Why do I have them? Also, what was I thinking?
10. Buy a new car when we hand in our lease-end car this summer. I’m thinking a fully decked out Nissan Maxima, red or black.
11. Either evict or adopt the squirrel we found living in our attic this month. I’m not kidding.

That’s all I can think of, but there may be more. Looks like a good list to me, and I’ve got 12 months to do it.

I believe Apple iTunes does strange things, and I almost lost my music for a third time.

I remember years ago when my Dell Dimension was new, I had some strange issue with Apple iTunes where 130+ songs disappeared. Very odd. A few months later, I happened to find them in the Recycle Bin of all places. I considered myself lucky that it hadn’t been cleared. In 2006 when my Dell’s original hard drive failed after a year, my friend Plex was able to recover my data, and I also used this Red Chair Software product called Anapod Explorer to copy songs from my iPod back to my PC. It worked like a charm.

Well, I just had incident #3 this week. I thought I was conscientious. I backed up my data to the external drive, and then copied it to the new machine. Sometime this week, 76 songs couldn’t be located on either the primary HDD or the external. However, they were still on the iPhone. Weird.

I tried installing the old Anapod software to transfer it back, but it wouldn’t work. I went to the Red Chair Software website for tech support, and it appears they went out of business. I did download their latest (and last) version, but it doesn’t work either.

I was flummoxed.

I googled some more, but I didn’t want to buy more software. Eventually, I found some freeware called SharePod. I downloaded SharePod 3.9.8, and it saved me. God bless the Internet.

SharePod v3.9.8