I was up till nearly sunrise the other night, sleepless over the possible fate of Don Imus. Just kidding, of course. We knew almost for certain that the late, great king of crank was dead meat from the moment he proposed a suck-up powwow with the Rutgers girls' basketball team. What kept me up was not the imminent prospect of Imus' defenestration, but rather the poltergeists that evidently had laid siege to my desktop PC. The trouble started when I attempted to fire up a brand-new iPod Shuffle, a gift from Summit Bank, where I'd opened a checking account earlier in the day. No sooner had I hard-wired the half-matchbook-sized swag to my PC than everything on an external drive I use for backup vanished. It took me a few minutes to figure out that these two events were unrelated and that my drive had simply crashed. When I tried to restart it, Microsoft Windows helpfully suggested trying again, and in HAL 9000-like fashion further advised me to give up if the unit didn't work after another try. Which it didn't. But the real trouble began around 2 a.m., when I decided to back up all of my data right then and there on CD-ROMs. Even now, half a day later, I'm still not sure what happened to all of the Rick's Picks commentaries I'd archived as Word documents. And about 1,800 mpg files, souvenirs from the Napster era, seem to have mutated into a format that neither iPod nor RealPlayer recognizes. And don't even ask about the iTunes that I'd archived for my 14-year-old son. I hadn't realized what a comprehensive collection of groovy tracks he'd accumulated ' on a weekly allowance of $15 -- until I spotted a few unfamiliar items on a recent credit card statement. Snowstorm
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