blue screen of death

The other day, my office mac got an internal facelift. OSX was upgraded from beta 3 to beta 4 (aka 10.4.8). I was stoked, mostly because I was so fed-up with this ill-working box. Hopeful that the major glitches were finally fixed, I started some serious scientific computing, running at 100% CPU load for several days.

Before I obtained publishable results, my hopes for improvement were dashed when the screen went dark and a nice quatro-lingual notice lit up, telling me with no uncertain terms that the computer thought it had done its job and that resistant was futile. I had seen this screen many times before, and I knew what would come next. This time I was bent on preserving the madness.

I ran down to the lab, grabbed the digicam and sprinted back to my office where the Mac was screaming at me like a deadly injured bear. Its fan was running at full speed at a noise level that would make any P4 Dell laptop turn itself off in embarrassment.

I turned it off in anger, ending suffering for both of us. You might say Macs looks good, and you're cool when you use them. But I'm old-school. I like things to work. And the Mac doesn't.