Praise then darkness, and creation unfinished

tl;dr it took a while, and cour four calls to tech support, but my files are on the Mac in the appropriate places and formats.

In our last thrilling exercise, your heroine was unsuccessfully trying to migrate files from Windows to a Macbook.

I spent quite a while yesteday working on this with tech support people, in chat, to figure out why I didn't see any of my supposedly-migrated files on the new Mac. The first person's advice -- just try rerunning the program -- didn't work. The person I talked to next thought the problem might be on the Windows machine, and I should fix any problems there and then try again. That didn't seem to work either, and by then I had four extra accounts (named myname1 through 4) that I didn't know how to get into. The next person on chat thought that might be relevant, but said she'd have to escalate the call, telephone only.

That was at about midnight, and I am not good at late nights anymore, so I arranged for them to call me this morning. The fallback at that point would have been a trip to the nearest Apple store to return the Mac, which would have had to be done today.

They called me, and I talked to someone more knowledgeable, who asked me to share my screen with her so she could investigate further. Those multiple accounts were in fact the answer, and the rep walked me through identifying which account to keep, and then deleting the others: I kept #myname1 and deleted the $myname account I created when I first set up the machine, and three of the four accounts created by the migration.

The cause of all this was that at the end of the process, the migration assistant asks "do you want to keep the folder named $username," and I misunderstood and said "no." It turns out the question meant "do you want to put these files in your existing account?" and I thought it meant something like "do you want all these files in a same place?" Now that We found and fixed the problem, I'm not sure why I interpreted it that way the first time. Afterwards, I assumed that when they asked "have you tried just running the program again?" or "OK, now run it again" they meant to follow the same steps as last time: it took a level 2 tech to figure out where in the process I'd done the wrong thing.

I still need to move my mail files to the Mac, because MacOS can only import mail messages in two formats, and Thunderbird uses neither of them.

I walked into work this morning, put my breakfast down on my desk, thought "Vista enabled WTF?!" and made a surprised sound as I started to turn my computer on, and then registered the size of the thing that sticker was on.

I now have a 24-inch monitor on my desk.

This makes a practical difference in my work--I'm doing a lot of work with InCopy, and it helps for me to be able to see a two-page book spread all at once, large enough to read the text. I had thought, a few times, that a larger monitor would be good. I hadn't actually said anything about it, because there seemed no point. But my boss arranged to get a few of these monitors, and handed them to some of us who she thinks need them most. She doesn't have one. Marilyn and I do a lot more with InCopy than she does.

I like my boss.

Oh, and two hours later there was email to the entire editorial department, from the head of IT, telling us that he didn't decide who got the new monitors.

[I could have a larger monitor than I do here at home, but I'm not sure it would improve my at-home computer experience--I don't do layout-related stuff here--and I'm short on desk space as it is. I'm short on desk space at work, too, but the tradeoffs are different.]

Grrr.



Must have backups. Putting a flash drive in next weekly supply order.

There is an evident risk in installing a model of the public in the computer, since the return loop might be misused by a despotic government or an unscrupulous management. In considering this however we need to bear in mind the cybernetic fact that no regulator can actually work unless it contains a model of whatever is to be regulated. Much of our institutional failure is due to the inadequacy of the contained models.

It is perhaps more alarming that private concerns are able to build systems of this type, without anyone's even knowing of their existence, than that democratically elected governments should build them in open view and with legal safeguards. —Stafford Beer, Designing Freedom, 1973

I'm currently using the laptop cattitude bought recently (for himself to use when traveling/commuting, mostly). In its favor: it has GAIM already installed. Against: the system has the habit of following links I haven't actually clicked, or going back when I don't ask it to. Also, the keyboard is larger than I find comfortable, which I didn't expect on a laptop but makes some sense given that it was purchased by someone with much larger hands. I think I'm going to take him up on the offer of connecting my desktop keyboard (and maybe monitor) to it.

ETA: It seems to be configured to treat taking your hand off the trackpad and then putting it back down as a mouse click. So we've plugged in a spare trackball, unfortunately very heavy, and I'm getting by on a combination of that, the trackpad, and using the arrow keys to move around.

None of this delights my shoulder; I think this nice box gets to be shut down and plugged back into the charger soon. I may not be on GAIM for a bit, therefore. (It looks as though the new box won't be shipped until Wednesday, which means I probably won't have use of it until I'm back from my next visit to Adrian.)

We have ordered new magic smoke.

In fact, we have ordered almost a complete new system (I'm not replacing the monitor or keyboard, and while I do want a new trackball, I'm going to get that from a store where I can try them out). The hard drive from the previous system will be installed in the new one long enough for us to pull the data off of it, onto the backup drive, and then onto the new system's day-to-day drive.

The new hard drive is 250 gigabytes. The backup drive is half a terabyte (enough bigger for incremental backups to be straightforward). Newegg was offering a discount if we got that particular combination, making it cheaper to do this than to buy the slightly smaller pairing (400 gig and somewhere from 180-250) that we'd originally had in mind.

This is my first actual new machine: we'd gone from sharing computers, to several iterations of cattitude deciding he needed a better machine (usually for graphics) and me inheriting the still-functional older machine. So we talked about what I actually want, including lots of memory and ease of backups, and what I don't (fancy graphics and sound), and worked from his knowledge of the current hardware market to design a system.

I will still be a bit fidgety until it's here, assembled, and has the software installed. But it's a new machine, it's mine, and it will have all the magic smoke in the proper places.

I was looking at something on the web last night when my monitor displayed it's "no signal" message (which is normally seen when I shut the system down) and I smelled something wrong. We shut the computer down (cattitude has quicker reactions on this, unplugged it, and waited a bit. Then he tried booting it with the monitor disconnected, in case the problem was there.

The beeps were wrong. Power off again, quickly. I used Cattitude's machine to send adrian_turtle a quick email message, soaked my feet while reading some Bill Bryson, and then we went to bed.

This morning, post-caffeine, Cattitude opened my machine up. The magic smoke had come from the motherboard.

I'm getting a new machine. Actually new, as distinct from "take Cattitude's previous machine when he needs fancier graphics for the current Windows games." We have other plans for today, but if I can figure out what I want in a PC, we can order it today; until it arrives, I'll be either sharing his PC or borrowing his laptop. As Adrian pointed out, it's a good thing we're a multi-computer household, or I'd be getting grumpy or fidgety about lack of connectivity. Especially since I'm expecting a contract by email, and do a lot of my socializing either by email or IM.

The new machine is going to live on my desk, not under it, because we think that the proximate cause of burned hardware is how much dust got into the machine while it sat on the floor.

I may download Gaim to this machine, or I may just wait. If you need to talk to me, you either have or can find my phone number. I'll be checking email much less frequently for a few days.

Google maps claims to have about 19,800 results for the location "thought of this while waiting for an A train".

Bear in mind that a couple of weeks ago I gave it "Earth" and it couldn't find a match.

I am copying DR-DOS installation files to floppy disk, and ridiculously charmed by the procedure.

After some hunting around and a bit of testing, I've concluded that we have a 386 laptop to give rysmiel and papersky. We also have a 486, but not if I fly up there, because the battery is completely incapable of holding a charge, so the machine might not pass airport security. (Amtrak doesn't care about such things.) Also, a machine that has to be reminded of the existence of its hard drive, and that it's not January 1990, every time it's unplugged, is suboptimal.)

Today, we replaced the old printer/scanner/fax machine with a just plain scanner ($30 after rebate). We thus discovered that we'd flubbed the testing a few weeks ago, and do not have a dial tone on the data line.

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