That fresh new operating system smell ...

So, this weekend, I finally upgraded my laptop’s operating system, a disagreeable task that I’ve been putting off for about 4 months now.  Many of my friends and coworkers are no doubt wondering what the big deal is: just do it already.  Some of you may even be thinking that I was avoiding it just because it would involve rebooting my computer.  But my computer was crashing every few weeks anyway, which is why I agreed to this unpleasantness in the first place.  No, it’s not the pain of rebooting—don’t get me wrong: that’s a very real pain—it’s the massive time suck.  For the past several months, I’ve been working on some tricky stuff at $work, and the thought of being without a computer for a big chunk of the weekend was just a non-starter.

And, in case you’re thinking that my assessment of the amount of time it would take to upgrade my OS as “a big chunk of the weekend” is an exaggeration, I’ve now completed the task and I can tell you: it’s around 8 hours.  That’s soup-to-nuts, of course ... starting with trying to back everything up (upgrading your OS shouldn’t delete all your files, but it’s one of those things that you really don’t want to take any chances on), upgrading all the packages to the latest versions before starting, doing the actual upgrade, then trying to reconfigure whatever was deconfigured by being upgraded against your will.  But, still: 8 friggin’ hours.  It’s a major chore.

But the good news is that I completed the second of my 3 simultaneously ongoing major projects on Friday, so I had some free time, and I figured, what the hell.  So now it’s done.  It’s too early to say for sure, but I’m cautiously optimistic that the laptop situation is improved.  Maybe not entirely fixed, but at least better.  Probably.

It’s a short week this week, so this is all you get.  Tune in next week for something more substantial.