Goodbye To 2025, At Last

Michie · Thursday at 11:06 AM

And: James Hankins on Harvard's Collapse; A Christian Convert's Warning About Islam

Holy cow, it’s New Year’s Eve?! How did thathappen so soon? I guess I was distracted by all this travel, and the Great Laptop Crisis. Took an exhausting day in Vienna yesterday to solve it. All praise to Darius and the staff at the Apple store on Kärtnerstrasse; it took hours to sort things out with the defunct screen, and the difficult of transferring data to my new MacBook Air.

There were no good solutions, only less bad ones. It could take between five and ten days to repair the screen, and two weeks to order one with an American keyboard. Given how dependent my job is on daily access to a laptop, that wasn’t feasible. That, and the fact that I’m going to Israel in a few days.

The next best option was to get one with a German keyboard layout (the differences are relatively minor, but any differences are significant if you are used to a particular standard). The good news is that you can set the keyboard standards on the internal software. So now my Austrian laptop thinks it’s an American machine, though the keys are German. I have to depend on my instinctive memory of where the keys are. And I have to order a silicone overlay for the keyboard, so I can look down and see what I’m dealing with when I need to.

This is going to take some getting used to, and I’m easily irritated by things like this. I’m typing today’s newsletter on my old laptop, using my home TV as the monitor. I’ll be using today to try to familiarize myself with the new machine. If y’all see stray umlauts here are there over the coming days, please forgive me.

Continued below.