In normal times, buying a new computer is a rather fun experience. In addition to the endorphin rush caused by plonking down a huge wad of cash for such a small – but often 好看 (that’s Chinese for good looking) – piece of hardware, you get to take it home and play with it and discover all the new and fun things that are different about the new toy. Even if it’s still running Microsoft Windows, your new vendor has probably come up with some new set of stuff to include with the machine. Or, far more common with me, my last attempt to finally come up with the “ultimate organisation of my hard disk™” was a miserable failure, and I’m excited about trying out something new.

So, imagine my disappointment when I recently upgraded my 15” Powerbook G4 to a shiny new 15” Macbook Pro.

Last night, after a nice weekend of varying activities (yoga, studying, yoga, sleeping), the plan was to lie in bed and read some Apple Developer Connection documentation for a while and generally learn more about some stuff I’ve been working on lately.

So, it was with some dismay that I sat down with Samantha’s PowerBook G4, clicked on Safari and got … nothing. The icon bounced twice and then stopped. System logs showed nothing, and the application appeared to be all fine in its folder in /Applications.

Uuuuuh. Now what? Oh yes, the System Console, in /Application/Utilities. It gave me the following very helpful message:

2006-08-20 22:32:29.825 Safari[249] Unable to load nib file: MainMenu, exiting

In March of this year, having largely finished writing my first book on web application programming with PHP and MySQL, I realised it was time to find another contract. I hadn’t worked in nearly a year, and the reserves were getting a little bit lower than I would normally like.

Around then, I started getting a number of emails and phone calls from people interested in having me come work for them for a while. Most of the jobs were to write some .NET applications or tools, or otherwise C/C++ things related to OLE2/COM that I did all the time when I worked for Microsoft in the 1990s. The money for these contracts is usually good, and I was relieved to learn I wasn’t going to be smashing open the piggy bank for extra funds.