Tired and emotional

To paraphrase George Peppard in the of-it’s-time TV show, ‘The A Team’, I hate it when a plan doesn’t come together. My plans for the four day holiday that has just passed included:

  • Conducting an annual review of my GTD setup.
  • Getting some serious blogging done here and at No 8 Wire.
  • Beating my offspring at some retro games.
  • Researching running routes north of Auckland.

Instead, I managed to get my iBook to throw a hissy fit by:

  • Allowing a colleague to install VirtualPC against my better judgement.
  • Trying to get the aforementioned and Missing Sync to work.
  • Trying to bluff my way to fixing the ensuing chaos.
  • Managing to wipe out my iTunes library with a iBook reset.
  • Sending ecto into a crippling login/rsgistration loop.

Luckily, I stopped bluffing and fixed the iTunes snafu by doing lots of this kind of stuff and then got way too tired, gave up and went to sleep. Having had this gnaw away at me all day at work and the dentist[1] afterwards, I came home and did a lot of file trashing, back tracking and head scratching, followed by a bunch of stuff nicely detailed in here and fixing ecto by doing the clever thing. Lessons learned from the last fours days?

  • Install/load/attempt one thing at once – Macs don’t like impatient humans any more than PCs.
  • RTFM – rather than blindly do the same thing over and over until your blood pressure’s sky high.


In the midst of all this mayhem and destruction, I did happen across ZenCast and downloaded the latest podcast in the series, an excellent talk by Kusala Bhikshu who, as well as being a Bhikshu monk, appears to be an enlightened Mac user as well. This hour long look at ‘Meditation – How and Why?’ was just the calming influence I needed to see me through my morning and evening commutes earlier.

With that, me, my karma and my Zen-attuned iBook will both now enter sleep mode.

[1] $365 for a composite crown to replace a long-destroyed molar! Maybe it’d be cheaper to get to the third Buddhist state, where being at one with the pain means I would feel no pain because I would be the pain.

Leave a Reply