I woke up with a resurgent head/chest cold this morning. That's what I get for going on the ice four times with a cold I kept telling myself was 'finished'.

Today I installed the other software I needed on my MBP and restored my data from the backup. The new drive is extremely fast, I'm really happy with it.

I think I'm going to set up rsync backups again. That's what I used for backups before Leopard. I'll probably do Time Machine backups too, because I like the simplicity of its interface for restoring particular files, but based on what I've heard from friends, I don't trust it for a full system restore.

It's nice to have my environment back up and running: Mail, iCal, Address Book, Firefox, and at the moment, Eclipse.

I haven't re-installed all the apps I use regularly yet, I'll install those on an as-needed basis.

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Check out my Twitter feed for info about my experience with backing up my machine.... short version: backup to USB2 drive failed at about 90% completion after over 10 hours of copying, bought a FireWire 800 drive and finished the backup and verify in 1.5 hours.

I installed Mac OS X this afternoon after finishing the backup, and after a busy day I'm finally installing software. I have installed Xcode/WO, iWork, iLife, and finished all the software updates. Still have to install Office, CS3 and all my other apps, as well as my documents/media.

I'm doing all this while watching the marathon Dallas vs. San Jose game on TSN. It's now intermission between the 3rd and 4th overtime periods. Wow, and I was feeling sorry for myself being on the ice for 4 of Cyan's hockey practices this weekend. Not anymore!

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Here's a new term I hadn't heard before: "Backscattering". That's what the pros call it when you get mail delivery failure messages as a result of your email address being used in spam's "From:" header...

PC World, May 2, 2008: 100 E-mail Bouncebacks? You've Been Backscattered.

Bastards. Someone remind me, spammers have no human rights protection, yes? They're clearly enemy combatants, just waiting for their own comfy cot at Gitmo.

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I've got dozens of "Mail delivery failed" messages in my Inbox this morning, looks like a spammer decided to use my email address as the "From:" address. Gee, thanks.

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• programming: In a comparison of filesystems, ReiserFS has one feature that all of the rest of them lack.
  Reddit has jumped the shark.
  (tags: reddit)

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On Monday morning, I woke up to find my MacBook Pro shut down. I didn't shut it down... when I rebooted, I looked at the crash log, and it said something about an hfs issue with trying to write a corrupted block (or something like that, I forgot to save it).

I used Disk Utility to verify the filesystem, it said it appeared to be fine. But when I started Mail.app it acted like it was the first launch! I used Time Machine to restore my ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.mail.plist file, that fixed that problem. Of course I wondered what other files might be missing or damaged, but that's not an easy question to get the right answer to.

After wasting a couple of hours trying to diff different Time Machine backups, I decided to forget about it for a while because I was too busy. My instinct told me it was time to re-install from scratch because the integrity of my system was compromised, but I ignored that because I needed to get things done.

As I mentioned earlier this week, I've also been having issues with the display not reacting properly when I wake up the MBP. I don't think it's related because lots of other people are having the same problem and I know some of them tried many fresh installs to try to avoid the problem without success.

Then this evening my system kernel panicked. I think I might now need two hands to count the number of kernel panicks I've had on my machines since Mac OS X launched in March 2001. Damn.

I rebooted the machine and it came up fine, but now I don't really trust the system. Something is up, and I suspect it's related to the unexpected shutdown. I'm running a backup of the system right now and typing this on my old PowerBook G4, which my wife uses nowadays.

Tomorrow morning I think I'll likely make one more (non-Time Machine) backup of the hard drive onto an external hard disk, and then reformat and reinstall everything from scratch...

Time-consuming things I have to install:

• Mac OS X Leopard
• Xcode/WebObjects
• iLife 08 and iWork 08
• Microsoft Office 2008 (I bought it earlier this month to write my final papers on, Numbers just wasn't going to cut it for my charting/graphing needs)
• Adobe Creative Suite CS3
• Eclipse and WOLips

And then there's the dozens of other apps I have in my Applications folders. I won't be copying them across from my current Applications folder this time, because I fear they may be corrupted. So I'll have to re-download all of them and re-install them all.

But what about my Documents and Music and Movies and Pictures folders? Not much I can do about those, I think. At least I've got a few months of Time Machine backups if I ever realize something is missing or corrupt, assuming I'll be able to use those old backups on my new installation.

Thankfully I committed all of today's work to my client's Subversion repository at the end of the day, so none of that is lost.

It's days like this I wish I had a Mac Pro with hot-swappable hard drives.

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