It’s a pleasure to be making this blipfish blog entry today for a couple of reasons:
1. I like talking with you.
2. It’s being composed on my new MacBook Pro laptop.
3. My kung-fu was powerful and true.

Okay, that third one is probably going to require some ‘splaining. Here’s the skinny:

I was planning to cross over into the world of Macintosh computers soon. Now that they switched to Intel and grew some marbles – I’ve found Macs to be extremely worth using. Prior to the Intel switch… no thank you.

The original plan was to get a Mac laptop about this time, complete with either Parallels or VMWare Fusion (I ended up going with Fusion – don’t ask why). Then, I’d slowly ween myself off the big, powerful Dell XPS Gen 4 desktop I was running. Oh, it’s beefy alright… two, discreet Intel 3.2GHz core-two duo Chips (yes, I said 2 chips), 2 Gigs of RAM, 512 Meg Video, Terabyte of HD space, XP Pro, Solitaire, oh, Oh, OHH!

[Sorry, please pardon those Tim Allen grunting noises at the end, there].

Ahem.

Anyway, a system that stacked was, understandably, going to take some time to phase out of considering I spent the last few years of my life operating off it. Heck, I haven’t owned an Apple product since my beloved Apple ][e back when they were new. So, between my data and software… I’ve been pretty entrenched in PC/Microsoft’s world.

I figured a month of transitioning and determining what essential software was better to buy for the Mac than run virtually would be in order.

…the Dell had other ideas.

I bought the MacBook Pro on Monday. I’ll have to post my “unboxing” pictures and story sometime… it’s as close as I’ll get to being a Mac dork because I refuse to wear frumpy librarian glasses, black turtlenecks, and drink espresso all at the same time. Anyway, I digress…

I bought the Mac on Monday. On Tuesday, while I was sitting down at the Dell to begin defining essential files, passwords, login info, etc. it flipped me off. It BSoD’ed on me. It Blue Screen of Death’ed died on me. It crashed.

The hard drive had a catastrophic boot sector failure. It was dead, Jim.

The worst part was that only a month earlier a Western Digital “MyBook” (external hard drive) also failed. Some data, at deep levels, is virtually to either backup or retrieve… it’s not always as simple as backing up files. I was stranded without major login and password information because the primary and secondary backup systems failed and the old school measure (read: hand written notebook) was lost when we bought our new house… probably buried in the garage somewhere. Back in the day a Dell system and support tickled me giddy. Nowadays my opinion rings much more of the expression “built by the lowest bidder” but that’s neither here nor there. I just know I will never buy a system from them again.

The desire to get off an XP system is more about not wanting to spend valuable hours having to, essentially, be my own IT, security, tech-support guy. Don’t get me wrong… I have good kung-fu, as I said. That doesn’t change the fact that I checked my logs recently and saw that I spent a total of 23 hours/month dealing with some kind of update, upgrade, fix, patch, diagnostic, troubleshooting, re-installation, or whatever of some kind of system file, driver, update, kernel, data, cab file, and so on and so on.

I needed to get to a system that required less “held together by sheer willpower” and on to something that worked with me, rather than against me. I was prepared to change platforms and OS’s and keep my feet in both worlds for a while in order to do it.

Anyway, the crash was dealt with – the PC is now running another, bootable hard drive and I’m slowly retrieving data off the failed ones, little by little. Wish me luck that I get it all, please?

This post is partially to explain my recent absence (since I couldn’t even log into my own blog!) but also is my cathartic way of blowing off steam from the last couple of days.

So, I think I’ve sufficiently catharted myself out now – thanks for reading and I promise I’ll get this blog back up to full-speed shortly. It’s been a heck of a Spring, let me tell you.