So I'm feeling like death warmed over.  I'm stressed up, I'm overtired  It hasn't been a great week.

I go pick up the kids and we go out to dinner.  A fantastic dinner, Happy Hill Restaurant is
one of those wonderful gems for good Chinese food in Calgary.

Afterwords, well, we were really close to Westworld Computers.  It's almost like I planned it or something.  I drove by, and there were about a dozen hearty souls lined up ahead of time.  They weren't selling Leopard, the newest version of OS X, until after 6:00 pm.  We just happened to get out of dinner at about 6:30.  Funny how the timing worked out.  It worked out fine - not enough of a line that I had to stand around hacking a lung out with a kid on each arm.

Popped in, it was all hands on deck in there.  Ryan, Nathan, Mike, all the folks I spoke with back when I was considering seriously picking up a MacBook.  Quite the crowd in there throwing a launch party, but my timing was perfect.  They'd sold out of the Family Packs by the time I'd got there, but that was no issue for me since I only needed a single.

Easy.  I grab my copy, get out, pick up the lung I drop on the sidewalk and we head home together.

Now, I'm used to the pain of upgrading.  I've had data loss, in fact I've lost entire hard drives.  I've had drivers fail.  I've had multiple drivers install, none of which worked quite properly.  I'm used to upgrades not going smoothly.

Before I even tried to upgrade, I actually went to Apple's webpage and watched their guided tour of Leopard.  Now, of anything, the biggest thrill for me was to get multiple desktops like I have with my Linux systems.  Apple calls it Spaces and I'm giddy as a school girl to have it on my Mac.  While watching the tour, I was pretty excited about their Mail program as well - I'm eternally sending myself email, and I never use address books because they're always a pain to populate and use.  I learned there's some real potential to outright change how I work on my computer.

Okay, time to take on the pain.  According to the tour, all I have to do is put in the DVD, reboot, and follow instructions.  Yeah, I've heard that story before.

I put in the DVD, click Install, my MacBook reboots and the upgrade process begins.  I picked English, ran through a couple click throughs, and it asked me where I wanted to install Leopard.

Sadly, it asked to an empty window of choices.  "Great, here we go again," I thought to myself.

The good news, in the installer I get diagnostics.  I bring up the hard drive through the diagnostic tool and - hey, my hard drive hasn't gone missing there.  I back out of it and take another stab.  Nope, no hard drive the second time through.  Bring up the diagnostic again to see if I can check the hard drive with an fsck or something.  Didn't really find anything, backed out a second time and *pling* the hard drive is there.

After that, it's all anti-climactic.  It checked the DVD, all was fine.  It took about an hour to install.  All went along perfectly.

No data loss.  No driver issues - although that's hardly a surprise with how tightly Apple controls it's hardware.  It kept my programs, my settings, everything came back as MY Mac as I left it, only with the new features.

Spaces alone made it worthwhile buying Leopard for me.  And I keep a very tidy desktop - if there are any icons there at all it annoys me - so having Stacks and keeping the clutter from accumulating on the desktop is a major deal for me.  Apple seems to have answered most of my big annoyances I've had in OS X.  Okay, except I still hate iChat.  Adium isn't bad, but how much longer for Trillian Astra, guys?  And that desktop background - ick, it was the first thing to go.

I obviously haven't been involved in the beta testing, and I even after a couple of months of having my MacBook I'm far from an expert at the ins and outs of the OS.  The compelling reasons for me to upgrade on opening day have played out exceptionally well for me.  I considered holding off on a MacBook until after Leopard came out.  I'm glad I got my Mac early, and I'm very glad to have got Leopard on Release Day.  Smoothest upgrade I've ever done and it came out perfectly.  Well done, Apple!