(Ir)religiosity

Political action and democratic participation have been points of contention in the Christian community for quite some time.  Now, as the upcoming presidential election quickly approaches, the issue of voting and not voting as an act of resistance have been brought to the forefront — at least in the blogosphere.

An interesting observation is that the dying Christian Right and the new post-evangelical, or emerging movement converge on the issue of voting though they endorse opposite candidates.  Both seek to utilize the democratic process as a means to bring about justice, though they disagree vehemently as to what justice actually means or looks like.  This concerns me to an extent because I can see it leading to the formation new Christian Left, which in my mind is no better than its dwindling counterpart.  But that’s a different issue altogether.

A few months ago David Fitch, who blogs a Reclaiming the Mission, wrote a post advocating the notion of voting abstinence as an act of resistance in opposition to Empire and asserted the Hauerwasian claim that voting itself can and should be seen as an act of violence.  Fitch writes: Read the rest of this entry »

And it was awesome.  Just wish I had some money.

I need help.  

Because I have an old school notebook, I have to keep all my music on an external hard drive to conserve space.  It makes things a little inconvenient, but I manage.  About 6 months ago my drive crashed and a lost all my music among other things.  So I bought another drive, wiped my iTunes and started the long process of recovering everything.

As of yesterday I had 85.59 GB of music (that’s around 15,000 songs or 88.1 days) and 13.52 GB of podcasts (604 tracks or 15.5 days).  Not quite back to where I was, but I’m getting there.

Anyway, here’s the problem.  Since my drive crashed and I’ve been recovering everything my iTunes has been acting a little weird.  Every now and then I’ll run across some music, music that I know I’ve recovered but music that iTunes can’t seem to “find.”  And when I come across the files I get the dreaded gray exclamation mark just to the left of the track title.  It looks like this:

Then I’ll double-click the track in question just to make sure and I get this message:

And then I’ll click “Yes” and go find the actual file on my external drive.

And what do you know, there is file right where it should be and right where it has been since I copied it back into iTunes.  But for some reason iTunes can’t find it.  So I select the track and click “choose.”  Done!  

The only thing is I have this problem with a lot of my music.  A whole lot of my music.  Just skimming through I’d estimate that around 1/3 of my iTunes library is “unfindable” like this.  

That makes for a lot of find and clicking.  Too much.  Yesterday I thought I’d go through my whole library and manually fix all this.  I spent around 3 hours and didn’t even get completely through the letter “A” in the artists section.

I’ve thought about completely wiping iTunes again and starting from scratch, but that takes some time as well, not to mention the fact that I’d lose most of my ID3 tags, my podcast information, my playlists, and other information (like play count most played etc.).

So here’s my question: is there a way to refresh my iTunes all at once without 1) having to completely wipe it and start back at square one or 2) having to manually find each track that iTunes can’t find and re-selecting it myself?

Any suggestions?