So It Looks Like the Apple Folks Are Learning What It's Like for the Rest of Us

In addition to fighting my natural indolence (okay, so I don't fight very hard), Weltschmerz, saddle rash, and the public career of Ryan Lochte, I've been suffering from the worst bout of Jobs-Induced Apple Colitis in the last five years. Bring back System 7.5! The really interesting thing I've learned in the past three weeks of fighting an utterly recalcitrant and vaguely Fascist operating system is that the vaunted stability of OSX really makes you long, when things really turn to shit, for the days when the damn thing would just crash and get it over with, you'd kiss off a few files that'd be forgotten in a week's time, if that, and get on with things.

I haven't lost a bit of data in a month of trying, but there's a very real possibility at any moment that I'll lose some to a high-velocity collision between my back up drive and my iMac screen.

What I have done (among other things) is watch a dozen videos on the YouTubes explaining how to solve everything from a Firewire kernel panic to staring at my own stupid name in the corner of the menu bar. Yes, indeed, I upgraded to Mountain Lion a few days ago, something I never would have done without letting others volunteer to be beta testers for the next couple months except for the panic (its, not mine). The first major improvement I noticed from that, I believe the commonly-accepted term is "upgrade", was that now my trackball wheel ran backwards. Apparently so I could feel like a hipster, or a Mom, with an iPhone. And it's working, because nowadays I spend fourteen hours a day staring at a screen, and I mutter to myself in public.

I admit that I brought this on myself by recklessly plugging in a new drive for my iTunes collection. As a result--and, again, this list is far from exhaustive, believe me--I couldn't use Mail without entering my password every five seconds for the better part of an hour (and Mail, once a program with a few restful and reassuring quirks, now has full-blown Tourettes); couldn't flip through iTunes--fuck iTunes, in case I haven't said that recently--in Cover View, or Toxic Flow, or whatever they call it, without a guaranteed freeze; spent a sennight where the Finder would develop iAmnesia after five minutes; stood helpless as the freezing behavior took over every piece of Apple™ brand software (and little else) like a pandemic trend in eyewear or social mediaizing; and now, over the last 48 hours, watched as every reboot (six, for the average half-hour) launched three pieces of software, the same three I'd scrupulously closed each of the other five times. That seems to've stopped. I won't bother recounting the adventures of my new, larger, Time Machine disk, which has been subject to more blackouts, odd conduct, and mysterious disappearances than the entire Barrymore clan.

The most remarkable realization is that there is no abnormal behavior, no matter how idiosyncratic, trivial, labyrinthine, or random-seeming, nothing whatsoever that your Mac can start doing that you can't Google up and find fifty people asking about. Nothing.

I've said it before, but where the all-purpose Chinese insult is "May you live in interesting times", mine is "May something you like become wildly popular."
  Doghouse Riley