One guy gives me a serial number. Another gives me an install disc. Another gives me a replacement hard drive and a site from which I can download, burn, and install a disk image. Another three or four post on websites with technical gotchas and information.
And with all that help, a little screwdriver work and a few scattered free moments later, I have three – THREE! – operating systems on the metal on my MacBook. OS X 10.4.9, WIndows XP, and Ubuntu Linux 6.10.
And just like that, I’m ready to start learning again. My eyelids are heavy, the clock is running, I have somewhere to be at 8:30 tomorrow morning…and yet, I’m not going nowhere. It’s as if the clock rolled back 12 years, and here I am again, trying to find the bits I need to squeeze out another K of free RAM or another few blocks of disk space. I can learn. I can teach myself. I can still do this.
It’s going to be a *really* good spring.