The future is still held back by the past.

I decided the new mac needed a monitor after all. We Mac people just don’t know how spoiled we are. Turn it on right out of the box and it works, and it’s beautiful.

The first cheap monitors, that I thought would do for my now infrequent sit down use were coarse, overly bright and impossible to fine tune with Colorsync. So the third monitor was a Samsung LED. I swapped out the Samsung Syncmaster205 from my daughters Mac, and I am using that older one here. She gets the new super-duper one. Big surprise for her when she gets back from March Break week.

Now that I have a view into the innards, I discover the iPad won’t sync in iTunes.

Seems it was a combination of new Mac, perhaps an unreliable restore from backup, perhaps a bad merge sync with MobileMe, or perhaps I mistakenly entered my MobileMe account and replaced my iTunes account information, but I was told through dialogs that some – well, really, all of my apps weren’t authorized.

After some help from Apple support it became apparent I had multiple iTunes accounts and they cannot be merged.

So in the interim, I had synced and backed up the iPad with the new account. I had 30 apps to update and waiting to be downloaded, missing music, and mysterious dialogs that told me again and again that I wasn’t authorized to use them. Along the troubleshooting trail, I thought that perhaps the iPad was set to the wrong information somehow. Backup, restore to new. No change.

Now in hindsight, this is all perfectly clear, but I was mystified by references to accounts for ancient email addresses I had used as account names, being unable to reset passwords because the accounts wouldn’t take my birthday as the security code, and email confirmations with reset links sent to an address I no longer had access to. Alternately, no reset mail was appearing at my gmail addressed account Gmail inbox either.

I could reset the latest MobileMe email addressed account all I wanted, but that wasn’t the problem. Somewhere, somehow, I had renamed the gmail named account to the email address from my Teksavvy ISP email. Aha! Resetting that account name to the old gmail name allowed access to the account at iTunes.

Poke, prod, reset, wait. At last everything was working again. Apps download to iPad, everything is swell. Except.

Apps download. But no data. I can restart Flipboard, Zite, Instapaper and most others with a fresh beginning. No loss really. But Chronicle and Numbers need the old information, and some pictures lost out of Brushes and other paint apps. And thus began another chase.

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