New MacBook Pro

So, I have now migrated to my second Mac system. There was no room for stickers on the back of the old one ;-) (and the keys had worn off for the second time and there was less than 7 GB left, causing all sorts of grief).

I managed to wait until the new ones were out, the ones promising battery life of 5-6 hours (which is what I need, not having to panic if there's no electrical outlet around). The battery thingy says "8:02", but we'll see what that is like after I subject it to my usual punishment.

I decided to stick with the 15" and not go for the 17", as I want it to fit on my bag and on the little tables on the train. I seem to be taking the train a lot recently. It is a bit, um, strange that I could actually use the screen to put on lipstick (it mirrors strongly) but one can focus on what is behind and not see much of the reflection. The colors are really brilliant.

My colleague said that using the migration assistant was a snap, so I tried it. Set up my same account name (mistake, more on that later) and got it hooked up to the WLAN. Just before going to bed I started to migrate the data over. Getting up the next morning, it had managed to shovel over about 10% of my data....

So after breakfast I set out to do the transfer by Firewire. Hmm, what a strange outlet. I went through *all* the Firewire stuff around the house (and it seems that everything but the coffee machine has a FW connection), and none had a plug like this. A quick Google showed me that this was new-fangled and I needed an adapter. Come on, Apple! Just pack an adapter in the box and up the price by 18 Euros, will you? It's a pain in the wazoo not to be able to use the Firewire out of the box.

So I scheduled a trip to the local Mac store (with my choice of either travelling on the broken down Berliner public transport, or the traffic jams of people avoiding this disaster) and picked up a plug. In black. Everything else is silver and white, why can't I have a choice on this?

We were going out for the evening, so I rigged up the connection and started it before leaving the house. Brilliant, all done when we got home, except that nothing worked. It had refused to copy over my old user directory to one with the same name, so I had given it another name. That was a very bad choice, as now pretty much nothing but Firefox worked. All the initialization files and stuff were, of course, stored with an absolute path name, and that did not fit any more.

This morning I took a deep breath and erased the disk, booting from the disks delivered with the laptop. It took *forever*, but I got a new operating system installed, named the admin account something QUITE DIFFERENT, updated the OS (man, am I glad I have a DSL flat rate!), and then restarted the migration over lunch. I was meeting with a new teacher anyway, so I had an excuse to take time for an espresso after lunch, too.

Back home everything was transferred, but Thunderbird still did not want to talk to me. The local files were intact, but the inbox not visible, and trying to start any menu caused it to crash. I couldn't find anything on the net about this, so I just renamed the old Thunderbird and re-installed it with a fresh download. Would you believe, it even sorted out the OpenPGP module that I had installed. So now it behaves, and I can continue working!

But I would like to know the idiotic reason for both of the USB connections on the LEFT hand side of the box, so tight together that I can't fit many of my bulkies in there without an extension. This is getting to look like my old Sony Vaio - it was sleek, hip, and needed a ton of extras connected by cord to do any actual work beyond note-taking.

The touchpad is kind of cool with the multi-touch stuff. This will make it hard to use other machines, but for now - it's nice, the keyboard (despite the chicklet-like appearance) is good for typing, and the thing is fast with 4 GB main memory.

Ah, yes. The battery has dropped to 5:50 in the 15 minutes I've been typing. We'll see what the wall clock says :)