Barry stopped by for his regularly scheduled meeting this afternoon. He wanted to show me a cool technology involving my powerbook, a camera, iChat and an AIM account. We began by installing a beta version of iChat. It would only work with OS X 2.6. That's when we discovered that I was a few revs back. As Barry put it, you are way behind. Well, maybe a month or two.

I went to system preferences and did a manual check for new software. Is seems I turned off my weekly check, so there was a bunch of new stuff. I clicked on everything interesting to me and started the download. It took well over an hour. Toward the end one of the last updates crashed. When I restarted things looked pretty bleak. Every time I tried to open my applications folder it killed and restarted finder.

That lead to a massive reloading strategy, ending in a completely new installation of OS X. I won't go into all of the detail. Just that it scared the hell out of me. I was afraid that I'd have to rebuild everything. Worse, I was concerned that all of this crazy activity would crash my hard drive. And it's been a while since I backed everything onto a separate disk.

Well, the rebuilding the operating system worked. I had to go back and re-download all of the new updated software. For everything that required a restart I completed a separate download and restart. That seemed to go smoothly.

The lessons:

1. Check for new software every week.

2. Don't try to download too many things at one time.

3. Back everything up.

Silly, because those are all old lessons.......
8:53:47 PM    comment []