Some of the best-laid plans…
December 31st, 2008
I was looking forward to having a few weeks off during the holidays. October and November had been very busy and I knew that nothing much was likely to get done in December beyond my own business housekeeping and marketing tasks. Great!
Task no. 1—visit accountant: pretty good year, needed a little tax relief, so she said to purchase that laptop before year’s end. Cool. Merry Christmas, Catherine!
Total Task Time (visit accountant + MacBookPro purchase): 3 hours.
Task no. 2—play with new toy computer—WAIT!—must first configure new laptop to match desktop. No biggie…this won’t take long… ;-)
- day 1: Install Leopard on desktop. Then use firewire to transfer data to laptop. Firewire doesn’t work. Call tech support. Update firmware & software on both computers. Try firewire again. Still not working. Will deal with tomorrow. Time: 4 hours.
- day 2: Call tech support. Again. Remove laptop battery and reset. Reset/restart computers multiple times. Follow other instructions. Eventually get firewire transfer to work. Eat lunch, walk dogs, do chores while monitoring transfer for hours. When transfer complete, attempt to set up new mac.me account and sync computers’ mail, calendars, etc. However, having difficulty with IMAP mail accounts on laptop. Give up. Time: 9 hours.
- day 3: Work on IMAP mail problems. Again. Go to individual mailboxs (Gmail, Webmail 1, 2 & 3) to read all mail and make sure I’m not missing anything important. Can’t figure out what I’m doing wrong. Make appointment for Mac Genius Bar after lunch. Genius Bar guy and I resolve mail issues (it wasn’t easy!) and I ignore Xmas shopping @ mall to go back to work. (In retrospect, this was a poor choice–but who knew???) Back in office, I try to sync my Palm with desktop, but guess what—they no longer sync! Seems I need a NEW 3rd party application to allow Palm to talk to Leopard. OK. I give! $39.95 and a few hours later, Palm re-recognizes desktop. Time: 10 hours.
- day 4: Time to fire up laptop. Open FontAgentPro. :-o Seems the application AND all 5,000+ fonts copied over with firewire—but not the libraries! Crap. Scrolling through all fonts will not work. So, if I’m gonna do this right, I might as well start by cleaning up fonts on desktop. (Remember, business housekeeping!) Then, upload separate font libraries (I’ll save client font sets for another day) to mac.me, sync, and download to laptop. (It’s Saturday, so I multi-task with home chores.) Time: 8 hours.
- day 5: I WILL NOT TOUCH A COMPUTER TODAY! Besides, my throat is kind of scratchy…
- day 6: Woulda, coulda, shoulda gone shopping when I was at the mall. Spend entire day on sofa in pajamas trying to install MAMP while taking cold medications. Time:14 hours.
- day 7: Previously scheduled Verizon service call to fix internet router problems. Still sick, but take laptop to bed and finally complete task 2—I just surf and play. Time: 4 hours.
Total Task Time: 49 hours!
Task no. 3—??? I can no longer remember! But who cares? My new computer is up and running!
And then it started to snow. And snow. And snow. And school was closed for the entire week before winter break. And still, I had not done my Xmas shopping. And it continued to snow. And—we live in a city without a snowplow.
So, the moral of this story is: never, ever upgrade your hardware and/or operating system when you’ve got deadlines to meet. Always double or triple the time you think such a feat will take—even on a Mac! And Xmas shopping really can be done on the 24th in 4 hours flat!
Happy New Year!