I adore my 11" MacBook Air, but that only really works if you're a Mac person.

I also adore my 11" MacBook Air, and it is my first Mac.

Stop tempting me to the Dark Side!

I fear it wouldn't be compatible with all the stuff I have on the PC platform that I'd be moving over. And by "not compatible" I mean, I couldn't easily figure it out. I'm going for a shallow learning curve, here. Like, flat.

Okay--my NAS does not like Lion.

I'm trying to save a document in Elements, and I navigate to a folder full of symlinks to other folders on the NAS. Can't navigate past them. I doubleclick on "venus" and it replaces the filename with "venus", and doesn't resolve the symbolic link. Who am I supposed to be pissed at here--Apple, or Seagate? (Hell, or Adobe--I can navigate this way in Finder, after all)

Seagate's NAS is no longer compatible with Time Machine, which is why I ask. I am mad at them about that--my firmware is up to date, and everything. It's a kind of useless lump of spinning silicon at the moment.

I have a Seagate NAS that broke Time Machine, but they did release a firmware update that fired it.

Which model, ND? I have a Black Armor 220, and its firmware is up to date, but no joy.

And Dreamhost, thanks for *nothing*. One of the least important PHP pages on my site is broken (it's one I use, direct URL only), and last time something like this happened, they'd changed their PHP configuration (disabled allow_url_fopen) without saying anything--this one, I'm going back and forth trying to work out why suddenly it's spitting up tons of "[Thu Aug 02 09:09:12 2012] [error] [client 69.163.231.184] access to /cross_sites.php failed for 69.163.231.184, reason: Client exceeded concurrent connection limit of 30, referer: christian bale, all hands" errors on the 2nd of August, when it hadn't been on the 1st, and I hadn't updated code since June.

No changes, they assure me!

In the middle of this discussion, I notice "This is just a note to let you know that we have moved your account to a new server!"

Seriously, tech support? I know it's not your job to debug my code, but when I ask what sort of things might have changed, SERVERS totally count. So at least I have a direction to look in, anyway.

That's the model that I have. I'll double check but I'm pretty sure it's been working with Time Machine on a couple of laptops with no worries.

• Firmware: 2000.1231
• OS X 10.7.4 Build 11E2617

Error: Time Machine can't access the backup disk/ The operation couldn't be completed (OSStatus error 2.)

So, no cigar. And Seagate says "Call me!" which I just about have no energy to do at the same moment as time.

Hmm, that's the same firmware build that I'm running. I'm about to head out the door to a tech rehearsal and the machine that backs up to that network drive isn't the one that I'm typing from right now, but I will double check when I get home this evening that it is backing up correctly to that NAS 220.

I know you're mad busy, ND, and weekends don't really exist, but if you do get a chance to see if my setup differs, I'd be very grateful.

There's another kind of help I'm beseeching. I need to write a guggle to zatch testing strategy. Normally, I write them in slices--performance testing strategy, UAT strategy, etc. But we're migrating a platform from physical servers to virtual servers, and there's a credibility issue, and I need to come at this thoroughly.

So far, I'm looking at it with these facets:

• stability testing (smoke, stress, etc)
• performance testing (acceptable response times)
• functionality testing (use cases)

Performance testing is pretty much taken care of, and functionality testing is a matter of resurrecting what we did when we first installed the system, but we don't normally do any sort of stability testing here. And this system? REALLY needs to pass these tests, because people think it sucks.

One of my problems is that I don't have the technical knowledge to design an appropriate smoke test for this platform, but I also am not familiar with the scope of tests that one does in order to assure (because that always works) stability. Smoke tests are just general "this won't fall over" tests, right? If I had general principles, then maybe I could work out how to translate it for this app.

My first deliverable is an overarching test strategy document. Does anyone know of good online resources for that sort of thing?