the curse of the early adopters

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Ok, so there has been a rather prolonged semi-silence from this blog

There are probably a few reasons for that. However the main one is technology.

I’m very into technology as I’ve declared here before; Particularly Mac tech. So when Snow Leopard – the new operating system- came out I was bound to upgrade before too long. However I certainly wasn’t in the queue this time. In fact almost by instinct I was going to leave it a couple of weeks or even months. I must be getting old; I was quite happy with Leopard and although I’ve never had any major issues with the upgrading process it can be scary and a little tedious.

A friend reimbursed me for a copy of Leopard by giving me a copy of Snow Leopard last weekend when it first came out.

snow leopard

snow leopard

With box in hand I was all set to forge ahead and see what miracles Apple had produced. In hindsight, it was not a good week to be experimenting. As well as my usual workload I was also really keen to print off and post more than sixty hard copy hand designed invitations to a soirée I am holding. I don’t use my printer much so I had an older (but by no means old) HP Desk-jet which I got cheaply from OfficeWorks 18 months back. It was doing ok and after early conniptions about printing colour via WiFi the desk-jet and I had an understanding and 20 invites had been printed and delivered.

The Snow Leopard upgrade did not seem to go quite to plan. It seemed to stop a few times and need to be restarted via a “hard restart”. Yes alarm bells did start ringing but it was too late to go back. So I plunged forward.

The install worked and looked lovely. I do love the speed and the application exposé. I haven’t dug much deeper. However my dear deskjet didn’t work and for once in its life it needed to. I wanted “old fashioned” invites with enough time for equally old fashioned RSVP’s. So after several attempts I googled and discovered that it should in fact work, I tried installing then promptly uninstalling various drivers and unsuccessfully winding the operating system back and forth.

Time Machine backups worked to restore although I ended  up with half backups all over the place owing to my permissions and some bad sectors on my hard drive.

After about 12 hours work over 3 or 4 days the easiest solution was to buy a new printer. I didn’t really feel the desk-jet I had was old but it seems to still not be compatible.

Most tech journalists often advise waiting a month before upgrading to allow the developers to “iron out” bugs. I’m sad to say that perhaps they were right this time.

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