In a mirror, dimly

What a genius:

Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler.

— Albert Einstein

Apply it early and apply it often.

Zawinski’s Law of Software Envelopment

Every program attempts to expand until it can read email. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can.

— Jamie Zawinski

As the title says, Apple Time Machine saved my skin this weekend. I bought this sleek little MacBook last week. I really want to have it supplant my Dell gaming laptop which will mean installing Windows onto a second partition of the MacBook drive and using “Boot Camp” (Apple’s nifty dual-boot utility) give me access.

I got the MacBook home and it quite happily migrated my user, my data, everything from an old Time Machine backup of the Mac Mini I have. The Mini has been used for podcasting and the goal is to podcast using the MacBook, so it made sense to migrate everything across using the migration assistant. You know, this really is how computers ought to be, just buy one and say “yeah … what that other guy did” and suddenly they’re dancing in lock-step with all the goodie moved across for you.

Then came the Boot Camp disaster. Or rather, the Windows XP install disaster that left me without a bootable drive on the MacBook. Still, nothing to panic about. Had a funny comment from Alison though - “Wow, you only had the laptop a couple of days and you’ve buggered it already?!” Yeah. I did … and a “full system restore” from the Time Machine backup rolled everything back to a working state. Flawless.

I was one of those strange people who lined up to buy a copy of OS X Leopard when it was released - I have the T-Shirt to prove that I was one of the first 100 people to buy a copy here at the Apple Store. At the time I told them that the compelling feature that makes me want Leopard is Time Machine … and this weekend it saved my ass.