Good news, one and all. My fair iPod is alive and kicking again, after a week on her deathbed. I was worried that she had reached the end of her line, due in large part to my continual disregard of the "Do not disconnect" warning. The geniuses at the Apple store knew the magic combination of buttons to revive my ailing MP3 player. Phew.

For the record, a hard reboot is done by holding down the middle two buttons, menu and pause/play for 6 to 10 seconds. Then you need to hit the outer two buttons, fast forward and rewind, to force the iPod to boot remotely. Then you can run the iPod update and restore the system back to a clean slate.

I must remind all of you that this sort of thing happens with all hard drives. It may just happen to you. You, the reader, should always backup your files. All of them. Go buy an external drive and run a program such as Carbon Copy Cloner. This Mac program makes a identical copy of your all files on another drive. Sorry, I don't know what the PC equivalent is, but I bet you that Google will have an idea.

I'm now uploading all my songs, and I am so happy that this cost me nothing more than a trip up to SoHo. Things are good.

I hope you have a good weekend. Mine is off to a good start.