Letter a, how I have missed you.

It's been a little nutty around the Erin house for the past few days, mostly because of my computer. I love, love, love my computer. It is the first good computer I ever bought on my own, it is my first Macintosh, and it is the beginning of an Apple love affair I hope continues for a long, long time. But, the love has slowly been evolving into love-hate. The sad truth is that my beautiful, faithful little ibook is ready to be put out to pasture. It's almost five years old, which in computer years is...old. It's a laptop, so it is hard to upgrade, and there are some things that cannot be upgraded. I did some calculations, and the costs of doing the needed upgrades are almost as much as the cost of a new computer. Unfortunately, since I have decided to buy a house and have no idea what my finances will be like in the near future, I have to put off buying a new computer, and do what I can to help little ibook limp along a little while longer.

The first step was to get an external hard drive, because my 20 gigs are woefully inadequate. The soon-to-follow second step was to upgrade my operating system from 10.2.8 to 10.3.9 (if you don't know what that means, good for you, it means you probably actually have a life). 10.3.9 is still outdated, but is about all my ibook can handle. I needed the hard drive before the update though, in order to back up all my valuable information (read: a gazillion songs and pictures) in case something went wrong with the upgrade. So I went to Best Buy and bought a hard drive.

It didn't work.

So I went back to Best Buy and exchanged it for another one. It didn't work either.

Thus began a frantic Apple support board posting and back-and forth email exchange between me and a couple of mac buddies (thanks Brian and Bob!), which resulted in the conclusion that I needed a firewire drive instead of USB, which I had to order online. This is another moment where people who have a life may be confused. Take a moment and be thankful for your lack of nerdiness.

In the meantime, I wanted to go ahead and update my OS, so I backed up to my ipod (poor thing is all full now) and ran the upgrade, all the time crossing my fingers that nothing tragic would happen. After multiple cds, lots of waiting, and a couple if restarts, all seemed to be well.

And then I tried to type.

It's amazing how little one thinks about letters until they are gone. In my case, I had the opportunity to ponder exactly how much I use the letter a. It was like a twisted episode of Sesame Street -- instead of C is for Cookie, A is for pple, pprently, lmost, nd rrive. Even more complicated, there is a letter a in my system password, so every time I had to put in my password, I had to copy and paste a letter a from something else. So began another frantic round of support-board posting, this time from my sister's house, since her computer, although not a mac, could successfully spell apple.com.

Don't be afraid. All is well. Thanks to the good people on the support board, and my keen ability to fool around with things I don't really understand, the problem is solved. A is back. My computer is safe for Argentinians everywhere.