Palm, then, is clearly a shortimer on shaky ground as Apple has managed to several up their opponents at every turn, and I’m having doubts that they will show up to this party with 80′s grade wine coolers. The iPhone is, after all, Apple’s flagship product already in its short life, besting even the powerful and battle-ready iPod (yeah, the iPod Touch is an iPhone without the phone, so you do the math). This new iPhone is just in time to sate the upgrade needs of the original iPhone owners whose precious non-3G gizmos 2 year contracts are coming up.

Interestingly enough, it appears that Palm is struggling right out of the gate by releasing webOS 1.0.2 today! Reports on PreThinking.com are already saying that the update makes the phone faster and adds a clock widget. Wow. I’m not surprised, since its a very Palm-like thing to do, but its not the kind of message that Palm should want to put out there. Regardless, there has been a great deal of buzz about the Pre and people appear to be loving it, with thousands of tweets hitting the nano-blogging nano-sphere as people pick up their new handsets at a local Sprint store.

The excitement is clear and many of the reports being posted about new Pres is very positive, which is a good sign. The other question is, “Who will win, Apple or Palm?” Fortunately, I’ll break out the old saw and say that neither, its the consumer who wins. Apple set out to completely revamp the mobile market and it did so in less than a year with the first iPhone. It has taken less than three years now for the competition to start catching up, and (this is my opinion) the Palm Pre and the new webOS is the first to offer a valid challenge to Apple. Apple wins, Palm wins, and we all win.

We get a pair of kick ass pocket computers for cheap! Nice work, fighters!

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When Vista was announced, it was reveled that Microsoft’s Windows team was yanking features (including WinFS, their new filesystem baby), and then its system requirements, I knew we were in for a rocky road with Microsoft’s obsession with making Windows more Mac-like. I was far from wrong. Vista has turned out to be Microsoft’s least liked OS ever (even less popular than Windows Me, though not nearly as hated as BOB).

Microsoft even stooped to tricking people into liking Vista by showing them Mojave, a tweaked version of Vista. Now, if they’re willing to modify the system to make all references to Vista become Mojave instead, what else were they willing to change… but I digress. I reported here that I would not be upgrading, and for some time I didn’t, but since Microsoft had sent me a press kit with a copy of Vista Ultimate, I couldn’t resist for long.

My fears, however, were well founded, and even on my powerhouse MacBook Pro, the best rated laptop (not Mac laptop, but laptop overall. If you don’t believe me, check it out in PC World Magazine) for running Windows Vista, I was disappointed. I had stability issues, speed problems, application crashes, random errors, and just general lack of cohesiveness, even after upgrading to Vista SP1. So, I removed Vista and reinstalled XP with SP2 back into my Boot Camp partition. I was done with Windows Vista.

But then… along came Windows 7. Microsoft had been telling us that it had been working on Windows 7. Now, my conspiracy theory explanation is that Microsoft determined that they were not going to finish Windows 7 in time to release anywhere near their announced date and so they were going to have a hard time getting rid of Windows XP the longer people used it. Its at the time, I believe, that they plucked a few concepts from their target OS and crafted a version of Windows Server 2008 with the UI elements from the upcoming Windows 7 to cobble together Vista.

Of course, I could be completely wrong. Interestingly, Vista’s release did quell the dissent which was pelting the intarwebs. It didn’t take long, though, for the issues to start cropping up and people to begin complaning. The complaints from all corners of the computing world that it seemingly pushed Microsoft to announce Windows 7 early. They opened beta testing to more developers, and word started leaking out that, while it looked like Vista, it didn’t work like it. The errors were gone, the UI pains were gone or modified to work better, the underlying core was far more efficient, and it all took less resources to do the same thing Vista had so much trouble with.

When Microsoft released Windows 7 to general beta, I hopped on over to my resource and got a copy. I did not, however, want to install it on my MacBook Pro. I already have a nearly year old install of XP SP2 over there, keep it up to date, and play my Windows games over there. Sure, I use Steam, but I’d had to back everything up and it would be a hassle. My wife just stepped on the Averatec AIO, de-tailing the mouse and gouging the screen, so that was out, so my eyes fell to the Averatec Buddy netbook which came with the AIO. I burned the installer DVD (x86, if you’re interested) image to a disc, plugged in my LG external USB DVD burner, and fired it up.

Total install was absolutely painless. It even archived the XP install into the ../windows.old directory and created a boot loader entry for it. I had previously installed Wubi’s Xubuntu, and that boot entry was retained as well. I should note for details sake that I’ve not booted either, removed them from the boot.ini file and deleted them. I wanted to focus on Windows 7 and nothing else. For posterity, Xubuntu 8.10 worked fantastically well, though I was unable to get the wireless module to compile correctly and was unable to test the webcam. Of course, XFce is a fantastic window manager, but its not resource intensive.

That’s good, too, since the Averatec Buddy netbook sports a 1.6GHz Atom CPU, 1GB of RAM, a 160GB drive, a 10″ 1024×600 display, an integrated webcam, wi-fi and Ethernet connectivity, and SD card slot and an anemic 3-cell 2200 mAh battery pack. Its really no different than just about any other netbook out there and its a repro of the MSI Wind series. From what I can tell, it can even take the replacement batteries designed for the MSI Wind. With less than two hours of battery life, getting a large 9 or 12 cell pack should be a priority. I also wish it had integrated Bluetooth, but you get what you get.

Installation of Windows 7 took approximately one hour, maybe a little less. The process is generally the same as installing Vista, but is cleaner. That may be my imagination. Setup was straightforward, though it wouldn’t accept my key until I entered it correctly (yeah, I’m a dork). W7 intalled drivers for video (Intel GMA950), audio, and Ethernet (everything else is Realtek except the webcam) but was unable to install drivers for the wi-fi adapter, SD card reader, and Buffalo webcam. Installation of drivers spec’ed for Vista was easy, though.

There are a number of improvements to the entire system. I’m not going to get into details in this article. I’ll save that for a full review when it actually ships. I’ve experienced it when Microsoft makes last minute changes to a product after the Beta phase has been passed, so I don’t want to miss anything here. RIght off the bat, though, Microsoft makes it clear that they knew they made mistakes with the Vista interface, so they’ve made nice changes which make it more usable. The first thing you will notice is the intergration of the Quicklaunch buttons, the Start Menu pinning feature, and the list of running tasks all into one neat, clean, tidy, and functional icon.

The taskbar also works slightly differently. You’ll note that the entire Start button fits all the way into the taskbar. This makes the pinned icons or icons from active applications larger and, therefore, easier to see. You can change this behavior by making the icons small (then the Start button protrudes again), add the title, or show all buttons for all windows, just like the old system. The new visual identification system, however, just works better. Its amazing that its taken so many years for Microsoft to get this. Apple finally got it when Mac OS X 10.0 shipped in 2000 and introduced the dock. Linux got it years earlier with various window managers.

The second thing you notice is that everything seems to run faster and more efficiently. One drawback is having to use Internet Explorer 8, Microsoft’s unfortunate choice for a direction for their web browser. IE7 was bad enough, but it could be tolerated. IE8 is just crap. Like most products Microsoft created based on the successes of others (like Firefox), they have taken what is good from them and created overly complicated and unecessarily obtuse versions. Don’t look to IE8′s add-ons to be anything even vaguely like Firefox’s plugins. I installed one for Skype into both Firefox and IE8, and where the former works just fine, the latter still won’t start, and there’s no clear way to get add-ons to start. Feh.

The third thing I noticed was how theming and interface tweaking has changed. Its mostly the same way as it was in Vista, but they’ve added some important changes. For one, you can now select any number of wallpaper images and arbitrarily decide when they change. Aero also apparently requires far less resources to work right. Linux distributions have proven that transparencies can be done easily on low power systems for years (I don’t count it when the console app shows the wallpaper but not the windows which are underneath… That’s just silly). Aero would not run on a MacBook (pre-unibody) in Vista, but will run on an underpowered netbook in Windows 7. Aero isn’t just some silly eye candy, either. There are subtle little behaviors which Aero can perform which improve readability and object identification.

For software, I promptly installed Firefox for web, Thunderbird for email, OpenOffice 3.0 for productivity, and, for the first time ever, Digsby for IM and social networking. All installations worked perfectly and there were no hiccups. Since I was getting the latest versions of them for installation I didn’t need to do any patching. I also went into Windows Update out of habit and gave that a shot, only to get an error. Oddly, two days later it started getting updates on its own. I don’t know why it happened, but it did. There’s been a long history of Windows fixing itself while giving no indications as to how or why. Maybe it was because I rebooted. Overall, everything I installed works just fine. I also installed Skype 4.0 beta and it works perfectly as well.

SIDEBAR: I’m disappointed and pleased with Digsby at the same time. While its very functional and has a lot of great features, it tries to trick you into installing no less than SIX freaking spyware/cashware/crapware titles onto your machine. You can opt out of each one, but its not a no-brainer. TIP: click the Decline button for everything after the first page where its deactivated (you have to install Digsby). I’d rather donate money to the project. -TCR

Working on a small 1024×600 display isn’t hard, either. Windows 7 has some new features which deal with this (or I didn’t notice them in Vista since I never installed it on a netbook). When you drag a window to the top of the display, it automatically fullscreens it. It will also move dialogs so that the buttons are exposed. They also added a permanent Show Desktop button to the far right of the taskbar. Once I had sussed all of that out, I then installed a few widgets. At first, I thought that they just made the widget bar invisible, but then I added more widgets than will fit, and it showed up in the middle of the screen. That’s when I realized you can place widgets anywhere on the display.

I haven’t tested enterprise networking, directory integration, VPN connectivity, or any of the other elements which made working with Vista a pain in the ass, but most of the crap that Vista dished out seems to have been rectified in Windows 7. Of course, its still running on NTFS and there was no sign on WinFS. I think that Microsoft may be on track to fix the problems they created from whole cloth with Vista, but I don’t think there will be a way to fix the growth Apple has made into their territory, and that’s a good thing. Microsoft needs to do a lot of growing up. It will have to innovate in order to remain relevant. Windows 7 is just a start.

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Apple has reached a point where they are now the defacto name of cool in the technical space. Apple has a cachet which Microsoft never had and it looks like Apple is now trying to capitalize on that. The simple truth is that cool doesn’t carry, and Apple will have to fundamentally modify its strategy to continue to grow. Its become clear that Steve may have figured out that no matter how many moves of the chess pieces he orchestrates, there is no longer anything new Apple can do that will have the Zing Factor of the iPhone.

They’ve captured the laptop market, the mobile media player market, the music market, the mobile phone market, and enough of the desktop market to make them very happy, and they’re watching that marketshare grow consistently. Anything they do now will be a derivation of something they’ve already done and people will necessarily be disappointed. This, I believe, is why Apple has been migrating away from the event-driven announcements over the past few years. Apple also had to have noticed that shares of Apple stock drop after every keynote.

I’m pretty sure that Steve knows that Apple rises and falls on his perceived failings and fortunes, and that’s not good to the ongoing fortunes of a huge multinational. Apple needs to become a brand again and right now its Apple is Steve Jobs. Mr. Jobs own mortality had to play a role in his views on how Apple should appear to the world. Apple is now distancing itself from its fanbase and will, in the next year or so, become something akin to Microsoft.

This will actually help Apple to grow as the lifestyle brand it has been forging itself into, something Microsoft has never been able to get a handle on. The people who purchase Apple goods now don’t do so out of brand loyalty or because they are phanboiz. They buy because it is popular and it works. This was the image Steve Jobs has been crafting over the last decade. He started with the iMac then the new PowerBooks then Mac OS X then the iPod and so on.

If Apple is going to move forward, gain more marketshare, and be a powerhouse from this point on it needs to behave differently. Will this piss off the phanboiz? Sure. Will it upset the loyalists? Some. Will it cement Apple’s role in the future of lifestyle computing? Without a single doubt. Apple has created a brand image for itself which works on all levels of a persons needs from the technological standpoint. They have made themselves as necessary as shoes, and unlike Microsoft’s lumpy pennyloafers these shoes are nice and comfortable.

That brand image doesn’t have a picture of Steve Jobs in it. Think back and try to find any piece of advertising material aimed at the general consumer in the last decade which has included Steve Jobs in it. My bet is you won’t find any. I’m also going to bet that Apple will return to MacWorld soon, maybe even next year, but they won’t do the keynote.

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Now, before I go and start writing about my regular stuff, I’d like to talk a moment about sense. There has been a row for the few recent years considering saying Merry Christmas, as if it were somehow bad. Its not. I don’t say it because I’m agnostic (if you need to know or think its the same as atheism, email me). Anyone who is religious, though, should offer their particular holiday greetings to others. If you hear “Merry Christmas” and you’re a Jew, just say “Happy Hannukah” in return, and then everyone is now the wiser.

Consider it personal cultural expansion, and you don’t have to ask what your friends celebrate. It also makes it easier to get gifts since you now know when to give them or how many to get. I hope nobody is ashamed to say it and I strongly caution those who are bigots to get a life and reform. Let’s just say there are plenty of people who are sick and tired of racism and you might just find yourself with a bloody nose the next time you say something unpleasant.

So, in my own inimitible style, Happy Holidays!

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Its not hard, however, to figure out how to make it more complicated. Convergence takes care of that, and what used to be one of the most beloved mobile messaging devices and an indispensable tool for the Federal government, the RIM Blackberry, has lost its way in a fight to remain relevant in a writhing sea of multi-functional nano devices which can play music, watch TV, fetch email from several accounts, browse the web, pick your teeth after a fine meal, and, if you’re lucky, make a call or two. They have cute, cloying names like Bold, Storm, Chocolate, Shine, and Behold, and they all (at least according to the manufacturers) do everything better than the Apple iPhone.

Until now. I introduce to you the one and only Peek. Its not an iPhone. It doesn’t play music. It doesn’t organize your life. Its not designed to make phone calls. Its more like 2G then 3G or 4G. It doesn’t sport a touchscreen, have any number of GBs of storage space, can’t find out where you are because it doesn’t do GPS, and doesn’t even take pictures. What it does do, and quite well, is email. If you can recall back to the mid-90′s when RIM’s Blackberry devices was just becoming hot with its two-way pager service on its neato 850/950 models then you might also recall that they weren’t phones back then. Not until 2001 did RIM add phone support.

The Peek brings back the concept of the old Blackberry and reboots it with a fresh, thin, clean, easy to use new device. For US$79.99 and US$20 a month you get unlimited wireless service which gives you access to up to three email accounts, unlimited SMS, and they’re adding features all the time. In the most recent update they added the SMS feature and the ability to view images attached to emails. My hope is that they add additional file types in the near future. Feature-wise, the interface is very clean. In fact, if you’re familiar with how the Blackberry works, you’ll be instantly at home on the Peek.

Setup of email accounts is very, very easy. The device itself has a number of configurations built into it, such as Gmail, AOL, NetZero, and many others. Just enter in the details and, if it recognizes the email address, it takes care of the rest. If you have your own mail server, just call up the service folk and they’ll set up the account for you. Word from their PR people is that they are working on adding Exchange access, as well. This should make some Crackberry addicts rather happy. I didn’t think to ask if they were also working on Lotus Domino and Novell GroupWise account access, though.

The hardware itself is very well made. The device is nicely this and light. The screen is 320×240 and has excellent backlighting and color. There are some things which could be slightly improved. The thumbwheel could be a moved from the traditional side of the unit to the front middle, which would make it easier to use for lefties like me. The battery cover, which is nice and solid, would benefit from having a strengthened locking mechanism. One odd choice was the placement of the extended characters which are located above the numbers across the top of the keyboard. All of the keys are backlit, but the aforementioned characters are not, so you can see what they are in the dark.

There are also some things which the Peek developers could do to improve the interface. First, there are only three built-in color themes, none of which are particularly attractive, to choose from. There’s also not font control, which I’m assured by my PR contacts they are working on now. One thing which they could fix, however, is the status bar at the top of the screen. Its quite a bit taller than it needs to be. If they could trim it down and modernize the icons and status elements there would be more room on the display for email. It would also be nice if there was user control over the colors.

The Peek is one of the nicest, simplest, cleanest devices to come out in a long time. It fills a hole which used to be filled quite nicely but has become ridiculously overwrought. It also fills the gap which the costly iPhone has created. Some people just want a simple phone to make calls a a nice way to access their email on the go. The Peek has no contracts and it comes in a few colors. The Peek is a very elegantly simple solution to a problem which doesn’t need complex solutions, and I’m happy to have one. It very quickly became one of my most used devices and I don’t foresee a time when I stop using it.

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Even in its short life, the iPhone has already captured a sizeable percentage of the smartphone market, and that grab continues to rise. The iPhone is a very complete product and it offers a range of features that no other handset does. At least, not until now.

Just take a look to the left, and you’ll get a small idea of what the G1 is all about. A lot of people use Google for search, but millions use GMail and a Google Maps. Google’s Android, a Linux-based OS, was designed to work directly with these Google functions, and more.

If the rumored price of US$199 is accurate and T-Mobile is not subsidizing that and offers some more open plan options, Apple might very well have a good fight on their hands. At the very least, it should force Apple into offering updates which it has been claiming aren’t needed.

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The people who died that day were not an attacking force. They didn’t have weapons. They weren’t on target to complete a mission. They didn’t have military sanctions to take out militants. They were people. Human beings going about their business and trying to earn a living wage. If you think that everyone in the WTC was rich, you need to rethink that.

Let us also not forget the 411 courageous men and women of New York City’s amazingly brave emergency services departments who braved the flames, dust, and wreckage to save other people from death. Those dedicated emergency response people and those simple, everyday folk were attacked and killed, not as human beings, but as one of the symbols of American wealth and power. Al Quieda looked at those twin towers and didn’t see people. They saw money and justified their attacks on that basis.

It was a cowardly, shameful, godless, selfish, and pointless attack which accomplished nothing but the deaths of thousands of innocent lives. But it didn’t stop there. It went on to cause thousands of more deaths in Afghanistan and Iraq, the innocent lives of Afghani and Iraqi people trying to survive life, survive petty, vicious dictatorships. It wasn’t already hard enough for them? Osama Bin Ladin and his cronies are unbelieveably ruthless, unthinking, misguided, destructive people who need to be stopped.

Terrorism is the most destructive and deadly form of bigotry we have on Earth and humankind has practiced various forms of it since time immemorial. When Segregation was rampant in this country, slaves were regularly lynched by members of the Klu Klux Klan. 9/11 is no less horrifying, but on a much larger scale. I truly, deep in my heart, believe that one day we can all live in an easier peace then we do today. Life may never be perfect, but I’d like to think that there will one day be no place that people can go where they feel the threat of death around every corner, especially in their own homes.

One day.

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What set me off is my freezer chest. I have a freezer chest which has sit in my house for the past year not getting used. The wife had been drilling me to get one for years saying that she’d use it and that it would be great. So, I get one and what happens? Nothing. Sure, we have some stuff in there, but it consumes maybe 10% of the overall space, which doesn’t seem a good ratio to me. So, I put it up on CL today. One person queried about it and I never heard back, then some dude sends this (I’ve not edited it aside from removing the regional details):

When is a good time to show it? I live on [REDACTED] near [REDACTED], so I wouldn’t mind going in the morning or at some other time to take a look. I am seriously interested and really do want it, but I will bargain on the price because I could get one new for less than 200.

Wow! Dude! So why not go get one for less? I’m asking $150? Isn’t that $50 less? I don’t know, as I’m not a math genius! This is the kind of thing I’m starting to see everywhere, but I’ll focus on IT. My wife is endlessly combing the gigs in CL hoping to find me something to do “on the side” to make some extra money. All I’m seeing is one person wants to have all of their data recovered from their crashed hard drive and expects all nerds to have “cleanrooms” in their apartments! Oh, and the guy can only pay a few hundred. Um. If you didn’t check, which is clear, these kinds of jobs require extremely expensive equipment and time and can cost in the thousands.

How about the lady who needs to have everything plugged in for her and can only pay $20, or the dude who wants all viruses cleaned off his computer for $5 an hour, or the company that wants to hire an IT guy slash mailroom dork for $10 an hour. How about the people on eBay who are warranty obsessed! If you want a warranty that badly GO BUY IT NEW! I’d put up one of my old Mac laptops and I’d get 15 queries about warranty! Did any one of them pay attention on the note I had in there about how it didn’t have warranty coverage or even bother to notice that it was 7 years old? No!

People’s emails are getting bad, too. Its like the whole idea of foreshortened communications has grabbed hold of America’s unified intelligence quotient and ripped it out wholesale. Some guy on a website asked about how he could improve his position since he’s been on the helpdesk team for over 7 years and still lives at home. It was no wonder that he wrote in anonymously, since it appeared to be penned by an 8 year old, and he claimed to have a BS in biology! Shocking, people! Where is the pride? Where is the belief that we’re the greatest country in the world? What happened to the idea that you have to earn it to get it?!

Apparently it got flushed down the toilet with the guy who was able to trade a red paperclip all the way up to a house. Expectations, people!! Apparently its all about free these days. If you can get it free and its mostly as good why should you ever pay for it again, yes? Its sad because, as a country, we’re losing out way. We’ve lost most of our manufacturing jobs because people don’t see building cars or computers as a skill. No! That’s akin to digging ditches! We can’t build things or perform labor intensive tasks, no! We’re all in Hollywood or advertising or we work in some office in front of a computer and sit at a nice desk.

We get cappuccino’s in the office and lunch handed over cost free. We get paid well enough not to care how much gas costs and other, stinkier people from other places do the hard things. Its amazing, because the people whom we crap on, those who do the hard work and get their hands dirty? Yeah. They’re happy to have the work and to earn the money, and a lot of them… I know, this will shock you… A lot of them actually take pride in their work! They are pleased they could build a house which doesn’t fall over in an earthquake or create a beautiful garden full of flowers or make your Mercedes work again after you rammed it into an SUV while tailgating and chatting on the phone.

That nice salad you paid $20 for at Spago? Picked by someone who makes a lot less than you, and yet they have a family to feed and a car to put gas into and bills to pay and family back in their home country to send money to. They likely even have more responsibilities than we do, and yet they scrape and scrimp every last thin dime and probably don’t spend much time watching TV, much less even having to worry about their digital cable, HD TV, DVR, and big ass leather couch.

So, what about the decline of man in the modern age? We’re too advanced, aren’t we. We’ve worked hard and our ancestors died for us to have what we have today, right? We earned those SUVs and McMansions and flights to Aruba, right? We earned the right to not have to actually build or maintain what we earned, right? What we are earning is the right not to choose where our goods come from. We’ve earned the right to have our financial power taken away from us by someone who is hungrier than we are. We’ve earned the right to lose our political status in the world. We’ve earned the right to select the president we don’t want because we’re not willing to get up and vote.

We’ve earned the right to wallow in our losses and pain. We’ve earned the right to watch an entire city be destroyed by the sea and not be able to rebuild it. We’ve earned the right to watch thousands of our young men die at the hands of others because of a lie. That’s all that we’ve earned. So, next time you go looking to buy something on Craig’s List, take a moment to see where the other person might be at. Think about why they’re asking for the amount they are asking for and maybe NOT chisel them down because it all about you.

Think about someone else and someone else might just take the moment to think about you back.

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I almost killed my MacBook Pro.

Most assuredly, as if I had picked up a kitchen knife and plunged between the shoulder blades of Barney The Dinosaur, I clicked the wrong “Delete” button. Here’s some history. I have a 15″ glossy-screen MacBook Pro 2.33GHz with 3GBs of RAM. When the Boot Camp beta came out, I held off, but a few months before 10.5 came out, I took the plunge. I had a copy of the RTM of Vista Ultimate from Microsoft, so I installed that to a 32GB partition which the utility created on the then 160GB stock drive. I had issues with Vista right away, so I yanked it and installed XP Pro in its place.

When Leopard I received a 320GB drive from Western Digital when those were first introduced. It took me three hours to install the drive and that was the time when I reviewed the drive, covering its installation and the drive enclosure I got from MacAlly. I did a standing upgrade just to see what would happen. Everything worked out well, so I reinstalled Boot Camp, this time with an 80GB partition and back to try Vista again, allowing for the possibility that a few updates might actually make a difference. They didn’t. It was back to XP Pro SP2 after three weeks with Vista and things went well for a while (though I did note that Half-Life 2 did run better under Vista than under XP Pro, which is likely a driver thing).

Time progressed and I eventually ditched even XP since I was never in it and always using VMware’s superb Fusion to run a local VM. I will admit that I’m a periodic gamer. I cycle through periods of gaming, usually when I get a new game, which isn’t very often. I also always cheat. I can’t win these games without cheating, much less get past the first few levels. I’ve tried to not cheat up until I got stymied, then I’d just cheat. The one game I am unable to cheat on is Call of Duty 2 for the Mac, which I nearly finished before I accidentally deleted it. Really kick ass game, which is a lot coming from me, Mr. Lamer Gamer.

After I got rid of Windows for what I thought would be good, I installed ReFIt, which I had heard good things about, and installed OpenSUSE 10.3 into a 50GB partition. I really enjoy Linux these days and, in my estimation, Ubuntu, OpenSUSE, and Debian are the best distros out there (in order of complexity). For Mac users, if you want or need a Linux distro, go with Ubuntu which is designed to work a lot like the Mac. I’m also pleased with Debian because they are still compiling their most recent versions for PowerPC systems. Fedora is, too, and its looking better.

My only problem was that I couldn’t get OpenSUSE to work with the LILO bootloader through ReFIt. I tried my own tricks and followed various processes, but could never get it to boot without the CD. Feh. Then I got two things in the mail. One was a guide to using Server 2008 as a workstation, which I posted about last week. The other was a guide to yanking some of the crap out of Vista so that it would be more stable. I resolved to try both, and aimed to start with Vista. I have a bum SuperDrive in my MBP (I’m outta warranty and did NOT purchase AppleCare), so I ran it through my external DVD drive.

When I got to the partitioning page and clicked Advanced I did the following:

1. I examined the partition map while watching The Legend of 1900 on IFC
2. I selected a very small partition (approx. 6GBs) and deleted it
3. I noted a single partition for 35GBs which watching the movie on IFC
4. My brain told me that I had allocated 50GB, so I selected the large partition
5. I watched a scene where 1900 was able to light a cigarette on the piano strings after playing a rather furious improvisational piece
6. I clicked the Delete button.

It was then that I actually looked at what I was doing and that the partition which I just deleted was 249GBs and not 50GB. My wife thought I was having a heart attack. I just kept staring at the screen in disbelief at what I had just done. I had deleted my the partition definition for my Mac OS X installation. I finally came around and was able to take in the situation and shut the machine down. Sadly, the damage had already been done, and I blame myself for 80% and Microsoft for the other 20. Its unbelievable that Microsoft hasn’t figured out how to develop a partition manager which allows you to examine your new partition scheme before committing to it.

So, there you have it. Had I not been graciously provided with a copy of ProSoft’s Data Rescue II a few months before, I would not have been able to recover my data. I have since been able to wipe the drive, embue it with a single HFS+ partition, install Leopard, and thumb my nose at Boot Camp. My only wish I would have ProSoft grant Drive Genius 2 would be the ability to locate and restore deleted partition maps, though I’m rather impressed with the utilities other capabilities, which are manifold.

So, the moral of the story is to backup your stuff. Use Retrospect or Time Machine or whatever you like, just make regular, scheduled backups of your data and periodically verify that you can recover data from that backup. Don’t be a Tyler, backup. While I didn’t lose anything, I did misplace my ability to perform a clean install on my own time and on my own terms. I also lost all of that time I had to spend on getting everything back and installed and fetching copies of the applications I was using to install again. There is a cost in that which few people take into consideration. Please, dear lord, learn your lessons from this doofus. Please!

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