SysOps Notice 2006.10.01

The Future is a real nice place to spend money,
but I would not want to live there.

Since I had a break in art projects and Apple had come out with the Mac Pro Workstations, I figured the transition window was open. The machine had met or beaten expectations. And I knew sometime, that I was moving to the new system (2x 30" LCD screens for display). When I change systems, I pass my current set-up to my best friend from High School.

Apple did this amazing thing. Their web site provides the expected shipping date. And mine held steady. About a week. I had read some apple E-zines comments and found only a short delay at worse for this model production's start up . The week passed and my system did not shipped early. A morning email showed a 7 day delay. But, 12 hours later a order shipped notice came with upgraded overnight shipping.

Not waiting was great. Migrating only had one slip, I imported (instead of reassigning) the new iTunes on top of of the original. The HD filed, so I had 500 or so duplicate names to purge. Not a big waste of time. Getting together with my friend came down to a specific day. I was going to swap an optical drive, both hard drives, upgrade what ever I could and send him home within 5 hours.

Only, one drive failed and I bent the pins on his master drive with all of his music data. If I had done that to my stuff with out a backup - for my heart attack, it would have been cool to have known the source of my demise. After jamming it in the upper hard drive bay (Apple's poor design of the G5 case), I am amazed, he was still thinking positive. My friend, himself, made the final re-connect of the damaged hard drive that let the migration continue, in-house. I was averting my eyes. All's well.

I bought another drive, gave him a mid size data drive from my system. (the new Mac Pro has room for 4 HDs) + found a version 8 of Photoshop and the Toast DVD burning software to try to get him to backup. With bigger displays, more ram, he can run the programs with a little less wear and can spread out his workspace. I hope he finds time for Photoshop.