Things did not go as smoothly as I had hoped (hence no entry yesterday, because I had no computer yesterday). Some tips for your amusement:

• Never start a reformat of your hard drive when your spouse needs to get online RIGHT NOW for her job.
  
• DVD-RWs are the world's slowest backup medium.
  
• If you haven't used a command-line environment in eight years, you will NOT be able to "jump right in."
  
• You will make hockey-puck CDRs that clutter your desk. It is a fact of life.
  
• X-Windows is not another name for Mac OS X.
  

The good news is that my hard drive is much faster now. The bad news is that until I re-learn UNIX, I have a 2 gig partition acting as a proverbial paperweight.