Gray is the new blue, at least when it comes to screens of death, twice and counting since I upgraded to Snow Leopard. I should be angrier, but anger requires focus, even if that anger is misplaced and/or delusional, like people in the southern United States reacting to a black President.

Sure, it seems obvious, blame Snow Leopard, after all the first incident occurred less than two days after upgrading, the Macbook running perfectly for nearly a year before that. Except that I used FileVault, know as VileFault to some, Apple’s answer to keeping the casual burglar from becoming a casual identity thief. The thing is, FileVault worked perfectly for a year, too. Nonetheless, after restoring my MacBook, I decrypted the Home Directory and all was well until it happened again.

Now, I’m wondering if it’s the drive, the wonderful Intel X-25M that I adopted early, perhaps too early, as there is a firmware update I can’t install yet. It’s supposed to fix something that makes my eyes glaze over when I read about it, but non-technically results in the drive slowing over time, but not imploding spectacularly. Unfortunately, I can’t update the firmware—just to be sure—because all my Macs have NVIDIA chipsets. When not in court suing the hell out of NVIDIA, Intel is making life difficult for some of us by requiring we update their incredibly expensive solid-state drive in a computer with their incredibly cheap chipsets.

I’ll be updating the SSD’s firmware at the end of the month when I switch drives with a relative who own’s a Mac with an Intel chipset. I’ve also ordered DiskWarrior, which is reportedly quite a bit better at repairing drives than Disk Utility included with OS X. I also backup daily with Time Machine and have increased my anxiety level by about twenty percent. I’ll do that until I find out who to blame and be angry with: Apple, Intel, or the Kenyan usurper.