Me and Verlyn

Verlyn Klinkenborg has a nice op-ed piece today. Like me, he's ordered "Tiger" for his Mac, and here muses on the historically unique notion of improving a piece of machinery, while being able to just return to what you had.

The only way to upgrade the refrigerator or the vacuum cleaner is to buy a new one. I can think of nothing I owned at the time that was capable of taking in new instructions and using them to improve its operation substantially. The only thing that could do so was not a machine at all. It was a human being.

There have been some profoundly ungratifying upgrades, of course. That's why computer experts recommend backing up your hard drive before you upgrade, so you can return to a prior state if you have to. There's nothing quite like that in the hardware world either. There's something especially winning about the idea of taking a snapshot of the present so you can return to it if the future doesn't work out the way you want it to.

You can play my waiting game too, as I wait for Fed Ex package 753369658120.