out into that document, not even pausing long enough to park them in your synapses, where time flies by and you don’t think about things like lunch, bodily functions, whether or not the sun is rising in the East yet, ... or when was the last time that you saved your document. That happy little moment when you hear the ‘whir-whir’ of the DVD drive ejecting as the screen goes black and the MacBook dumps your latest deepest thoughts into a pile of zeros and ones somewhere on the floor underneath your feet. That sinking feeling in your gut as you wait for the reboot, to see what’s left of your document after going through the bit shredder.

Oh, how I wish I could say that they’re random reboots that I’m experiencing. But no, it’s not that simple. After several months, I’ve found the cause: it’s my (former) computer bag, one of my jackets, and polyester meeting hall tablecloths. It’s static freaking electricity. I close the computer, put it in my bag, and bam it either does a kernel panic (and soon thereafter heats the bag to 1000ºF as the processors go completely pegged) or reboots. I

close the computer, tuck it under my arm, and walk to the next building ... and hear that sickening ‘whir-whir’ as it reboots.

So I’ve taken to saving frequently, and leaving applications closed. Guess I don’t need that extra gig of RAM after all.

Update: I think I may have figured out what the problem is.  I think it’s related to setting off the hard drive motion sensor while the machine is in the middle of the process of going to sleep.  I can now repeat the problem somewhat at will, but not entirely.  Guess it’s off to the Apple store for me this weekend.

10 What’s next?

I know something is looming on the horizon. I can feel it in my bones.

Update: I was right!

10.1  Woke up this morning and dotMac had eaten all of my contacts across four machines.  Luckily, I had a backup so I was able to restore them.

10.2  Oh, and there’s no phone number to call for dotMac ... the automated 1-800 number for Apple support actually hung up on me after telling me the URL for web support.

But now we’re in limbo-land. We like the shine of the Mac. The Mac works the way my brain works. My hypertasking wife lives for the ‘one fewer click’ mantra of the Mac interface. And our company is dependent on the Mac environment, from .Mac for information sharing to iWeb for building our website.

We don’t want to go back to the PC, but the Mac is giving us fits. What ever happened to the AS/400, the greenscreen, the halcyon days of glass houses and hard-wired VT-100s? What ever happened to the build quality of the PowerBook G4s and the IBM ThinkPads?

Maybe it’s time for a Dell.

Ok, no.

We’re stuck.