Date: 2008-11-02 11:52:02 Created: null
Suddenly, the screen turned blue. The blue of startup, before Finder and my desktop image is loaded. iTunes stopped playing. The spinning loading symbol of bootup/shutdown appeared briefly. The pointer, which at least was still responsive, turned into the spinning disc we all know and love.
Bummer.
What did I do? Is OS X supposed to do this?
But then, my desktop came back. Finder was loaded in seconds. Sure, all applications had been quit, but nothing had been lost and the computer hadn't even needed a restart to come back. The inner workings of OS X had kept running without missing a beat, and the uptime was intact. I still don't know what I did that made Finder panic (but I have a theory that it really is something I did. I have the logs, but I can't say I'm good enough to actually see the cause of the crash from looking at them), but it's great to know the OS can deal with it this gracefully.
To tell the truth, I've had a few crashes in my year of major OS X usage and most of them haven't been this nicely resolved. Things have locked up very hard once or twice. Nothing a reboot can't handle, but not needing reboots is one of the things I really like about this computer and OS. But I guess it happens very rarely, because it hasn't made me doubt the general stability of the computer or change my habits to be nicer to it.