All 23 gigabytes of my PowerBook’s hard drive have been backed up to my G4 tower, so I am, in some sense, ready to install Panther, the newest version of Apple’s Mac OS X software, as soon as it goes on sale tonight. In about an hour and a half, on my way home, I’ll probably swing by the venerable Tekserve and pick up my own copy… but I cant’t decide whether to actually go through with it and really install this major upgrade to the operating system on the very first weekend of its public release. Typically, I would wait a little while to see what kinds of problems other, more adventurous Macintosh fans might encounter. But there’s something about Panther that has me very anxious, and I’m just itching to get it running on my Mac. In all likelihood, I will install it on an external FireWire drive, but somehow I know I won’t be satisfied until I’ve thrown caution completely to the wind.