Some days, it's just not worth turning the computer on. This catalog has brought out the worst in my Mac—Friday night the monitor died, and today I left the apartment in the middle of a job, only to return and find the damn thing sleeping with no way to wake it up. Some kind of OD, I guess. Two hours, an OS reinstall, and a copy of Norton Utilities later, I appear to be up and running again. But the innocence is lost—once a new computer crashes badly for the first time, you can never quite trust it the same way.

That'll teach me to take a two-hour break to go to a discussion about death…