Mac Attack
Well, I have a Mac again. I'll cross my fingers that that continues to be the case.

I don't even know what happened exactly. I rebooted the thing last Tuesday because it was getting slow, and when it came back up it would no longer run Mozilla Thunderbird, Adobe Illustrator, Adobe Photoshop, or Microsoft Anything.

Now some folks might consider their computer not running Microsoft Anything a blessing, but it was kind of a problem for me, especially since I'm still trading chapters of the iPhone Book with copy editors and proofreaders (and writing some new iPhone articles too, for that matter). At least it happened after I finished the main text of the book. The day after I finished the main text of the book, as it happens.

Fortunately I have a Time Machine running on the Mac. So I time-machined back to the day before the problems happened (after, y'know, trying to fix the problem, because computers shouldn't just totally go wacky, irreparably like that). Afterward, the machine remained stable for approximately two minutes. Then it started failing to run every frickin' program *and* when I rebooted it, it got into a reboot-crash infinite loop.

Nice.

So I time machined back further, to October 31, then I used Time Machine to restore just the Documents directory from yesterday. Thus far, it's been running solidly for four or five hours.

I probably lost a few things in other directories, like local mail, but if I notice anything I can't live with, I suppose I can try to get that back from Time Machine too.

I'm *still* very suspicious of the Mac. A machine that fails under super mysterious conditions twice is very untrustworthy. I've already checked the memory, but if it happens again, I'll suspect the disk (though that comes up OK on tests too).

Well, at least nothing was lost--other than many hours of my time.

I must say, using the older Windows machine for the last week, with its teeny screen felt like being in prison.