I got back last night, but was a bit too under the weather to get anything up on the site. My 12" Powerbook took a major turn for the worse on the Friday after Thanksgiving, forgetting somehow that letters before “r” in the alphabet existed. This lead to a jumbled, alphabet soup computing experience. Running Diskwarrior revealed that the Toshiba drive in the machine was about to fail. Shortly thereafter, just after I got most of the data off of the machine, it did. My experience may not be typical, but this is the second Apple laptop to have a major failure on me in less than a year. It’s under warranty, and no doubt it will get repaired, but the hassle these two failures have caused me is substantial. This week’s cost me several days worth of work, and I now find myself behind on a very important work project that has to launch this week. I backup on a regular basis. On the other hand, there is only so much you can do, especially when you are on the road. I wish I felt like computer equipment had gotten more reliable over the years, but I definitely do not feel that this is the case.