Here kitty kitty kitty...

Last Friday Mac OS X 10.5 "Leopard" was unleashed upon the Mac user community.

One word: WOW. OK, I'm not the type to "Ooooh! Ahhh! OH!" on command when anything new comes out from Apple. When something new is announced, I look first at it from the view of that twisted . diabolical entity, the Demon Murphy" What can go wrong with it? Because sure as anything, any x.0 software release is gonna have more bugs than Juan Rico's first battle as MI. No matter how many nice new features the OS has . . . like Time Machine (resolves big hassle #2: the HELL of a manual backup. Believe me, unless you know EXACTLY what you are doing, you DO NOT want to back up a Mac manually. There is a right way to manually backup, and a very large number of WRONG ways...), the RSS reader, Notes and stationary in Mac Mail, Back to My Mac (Remote Access to Internet-connected Leopard Macs via wide-area Bonjour and .Mac), better security features, and gosh darn it, it's PRETTIER than Windows Vista!

The funny thing about Leo (as I call it) is that most of the install issues I've seen so far have happened not to Mac tyros, but to folks who know a thing or two about the OS and are confident enough about Tiger to install things like IU enhancements, custom System Preference panels, the kind of thing that back in the days of single-digit Mac OS releases were called 'haxies" (rhymes with "taxis").

Bad move. Here's RichO's First Axiom of Personal Computing: "System Software Upgrades are more likely to succeed when the old OS is not hacked. The Clean Install is Your Friend."

The Second Axiom of Personal Computing: "Any sufficiently complex computer system, given enough resources and time, can and will be hacked."

The RichO Third Axiom of Personal Computing (aka "a little knowledge is dangerous"): "The middle of the Computer User Learning Curve is the most dangerous slope known to support personnel: the end user is confident enough to 'try things' but not skilled enough to understand what can and eventually will go wrong and why; the end user is likewise susceptible to specious advice from both informal and formal support channels."

The RichO Fourth Axiom of Personal Computing (Moore's Law): "If ordering a base system from an OEM with x GB RAM and hard drive space, order one with at least 2x because in 18 months you'll need the space"

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Listening to: Leslie Fish - The Earth's Firebreathing Daughter