I finally got a chance to upgrade my desktop operating system to OS X Mountain Lion yesterday. And of course I have devices to upgrade to iOS 6 this week, too, although one OS per day is more than enough. Every time I update the OS I remember what a pain it is and why I miss the days when I only had to go through this pain once every five years or so. Given that, this upgrade doesn’t seem to be as bad as the Snow Leopard to Lion upgrade, where it took me weeks to figure out how to scroll correctly. This time my biggest complaint is that Apple defaulted a calendar preference that now means I will be constantly alerted to every all day event I have scheduled. For the record, none of my all day events — and I have lots of them — had alarms before this.

On top of these OS changes, I’ve also been steadily updating my development skills. I’ve been exploring new features in iOS, learning OS X, and getting up to speed on the latest changes to Rails as well. My code for iOS in particular is so much better than it was even a few months ago and the changes Apple has made to the compiler are really nice. At the same time, massive changes to the way things are done. The older I get, the more stuck in my ways, the less I want to completely re-think the way I am writing code every year.

Upgrading isn’t easy, and I say that knowing full well that Apple’s iOS and OS X upgrades are about as painless as I could possibly expect. It would stink if technology stayed still. After all, we have a long way to go with this technology before it can stop changing. On the other hand, it would be nice if things didn’t change quite so often.

I’ve got whiplash.