Well, I had to reinstall OS X today. I'm a little cranky about it, but it is something that is fixable at least. There is a hardware problem with my dvd drive that makes it so that sometimes CDs put into it won't mount. Instead just a loud humming/buzzing noise comes from the drive. I called AppleCare and they said I should be able to go into an Apple Store and just have it replaced there. This was quite good news.

The bad news was that my system had wedged with a drive in it and I had to powercycle. In doing that something on disk was corrupted. So, I had to first repair the disk, then copy off the files I wanted to keep (thank god for firewire) and then reinstall. As far as I can tell, I haven't lost any data, which is pretty damn cool.

Also, I am so sold on firewire right now. It is so easy to boot from a firewire device (disk or cd-rom drive) at boot time. Windows doesn't really have anything close to this. If I had been on a windows system I would have been screwed. Maybe not completely, but the amount of effort it took for me to fix things was much less then it would have been under a PC.

A big thanks goes out to the cool guy at AppleCare who sat on the phone with me for over an hour.