(I promise this is the last entry about computers.)

Top Ten Things Learned During the Past Ten Days:

1) You never want to hear the word “pulverized” in relation to your hard drive.

2) While I appreciate the Mac people giving me a new hard drive (because I had the extended warranty), I would prefer that they build less-easily pulverized Macs. (Mine was 2.75 years old.)

3) Get the extended warranty.

4) Don’t feel complacent because you have a Mac. I did.

Apple used to be special. They used to make amazing, durable, technological marvels. Now they seem to have subscribed to the old business model of planned obsolescence. A friend of mine recently suffered a hard drive crash of her newish Mac, too. She’s stunned. She said her old Mac worked great for ten years.

5) As explained to me by the MacForce tech, here’s what probably happened to my drive, and why this might matter to you: the process of migrating data tries to access the whole hard drive at once. If my hard drive was on the verge of failing (although it pains me to think a not-quite-three-year-old drive was ready to die), the data migration pushed it over the edge. So: always back up your hard drive before you download updates for your computer! Because that process also tries to access your whole hard drive at once.

6) I will still buy Macs. They are less vulnerable to viruses. But I don’t trust them, anymore. Hence, obsessive emailing files to myself and total backups weekly.

7) It’s not a person. It’s just a machine. Things could be worse.

8) I don’t really have ten things.

9) Agent Nathan Bransford posted an excellent Top Ten list last week: Ten Commandments for a Happy Writer. I love the whole list, but I especially love the stop-whining tone of #9:

“Be thankful for what you have. If you have the time to write you're doing pretty well. There are millions of starving people around the world, and they're not writing because they're starving. If you're writing: you're doing just fine. Appreciate it.”

10) I can write more.