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.

The problem with editing (or, I expect, writing) test-prep books that have to match state standards is that they often list the state standards, presumably for reference or to impress whoever makes the purchasing decisions. Thus, when something stupid has gotten into the state standard, I can't mark it for correction. Today's annoyance was, in an otherwise reasonable statement about climate change, a list of "minor" atmospheric gases whose increased concentrations are leading to global warming. The list includes O₂. Not a typo for O₃ (ozone). I double-checked. And then left a note on the manuscript so the next person wouldn't also spend time checking.

Clarification: The actual text is "Describe how changes in concentration of minor components
(e.g., O₂, CO₂, ozone, dust, pollution) in Earth's atmosphere are linked to climate change." So it doesn't specify "increase" but it does call oxygen a minor component of the atmosphere, and asserts that there are measurable changes in the oxygen concentration of the atmosphere over, say, the last couple of centuries.

I went to the gym after work, but edited the workout because my back is still bothering me some. I walked in there figuring I would at least do cardio (having shorted myself last time) and crunches (on the theory that exercising my abdominal muscles might help my back). I did a bit more.

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I posted a couple of hours ago (filtered) grumbling about a Website that's not working properly: I can't find certain files, and some URLs are being rewritten weirdly. The answer is to use IE; I got this from someone who, like me, prefers Firefox, but we don't control what's going on over there, and the developers apparently feel that, having said that the requirements to use this system are IE 5.5 or higher plus a login, they don't need to support any other browser.

So I have taken a deep breath and downloaded M$'s latest security fix to IE, and will try again in a little while (my system is currently taking a backup, which is an excuse to procrastinate; clearly I don't mind using the Web while taking a backup).