sarah!Reinstall on a machine’s terms
And here, I thought I’d gotten the computer back to normal over the weekend. Apparently I didn’t and I’ve lost all the work I did. It’s come to this: reinstalling OS X tonight to get a jump on this arduous task before this weekend. I’ve lost all my email…again. All my customizations…again. Luckily, I finally smartened up and printed out the various registration codes this time, instead of simply storing them in my email.
The refusal of Neo Office to open this morning (and it was a brand new install from this weekend) should have tipped me off something was terribly amiss. So should have the fact I had to pry a disk from the disk drive this morning and the fact the machine wouldn’t boot up if all my periphrials were attached. Oh, and tonight, when my iPod wasn’t recognized as being registered to this particular computer, I got that sick feeling in my gut. But when I opened up Apple Mail and was prompted to enter my email account information, I knew the gig was up and I’d have to bite the bullet.
Seriously. I didn’t buy a Mac for this. Macs are supposed to be stable. Stable. Stable. Not like Windows. I should stop my bitching, though and be thankful all my important files have been backed up (namely my address book, my banking spreadsheet, and my resume, although none does fuck all now, and won’t until I get this fixed…oh, and of course, my ever-growing and extensive picture collection of classic movie actresses).
Believe it or not, I’ve been wanting to do this for a long time, a clean install of OS X.
But I wanted to do it on my terms. Not the computer’s.
This is a topic I’ve discussed in earlier incarnations of SCS, but it’s still nagging at my mind, so I think it’s worthy of another post, not to mention I’ve found another example of it recently. I’ve always assumed silent movies are black and white by default and although one copy of 
Why? I’ve discussed this with a couple of people and can’t find an explanation I can accept. Colorized, thanks to Ted Turner’s evil plot to eradicate the world of anything as dull as a black and white film? I really don’t think that’s it at all; the color found here simply doesn’t look like a clumsy and poor job of it, as is so evident in movies coming from Turner’s mad laboratory. It’s too natural to be Turner’s Frankenstein, too even, and frankly, too professional.
Dichotomous Monday: From stumbling across and then enjoying artful pictures of two women in love and sighing inwardly, remembering to this…listening to some fuckin’ off the wall weird, one of the three strangest albums on my computer. What the hell - is that creature supposed to resemble Henry VIII?
When push came to shove, I didn’t need to reinstall OS X - or should I say I chose not to? That being said, though, I think I’ve probably spent almost as much time fixing the computer, i.e. setting up Apple Mail, Camino, re-registering some of my most-used and much-loved little programs. The only thing left now is to figure out how to salvage the playlists from my iPod and get them back into iTunes; I’ve got a wee program that should let me do that, as it has done in the past, but for some reason, it’s giving me fits and starts this morning and so I’m going to put it up for a while and work on other things.
I’ve also downloaded a 
So, back to keeping my time in front of the computer from taking over any free time I might have. In order to accomplish this, I’ve reached deep into the movie vault and have come back with silent movies filling my hands.