Crazy Technology Week
I’m not really sure what exactly is wrong with the Internet access in my hotel room except to say that it is flaky. It works intermittently and I’ve been very cautious in creating blog posts to make sure I save what I’ve been working on frequently. I’ll ask at the desk later this morning what might be wrong and in the meantime be careful.
This is just another incident in what has been thus far a weird technology week. Before heading off to Oregon for Code4Lib, I decide to upgrade my Mac to OS 10.4 Why I chose this particular (potentially not so bright) moment to destroy my computer you ask? Well, it the first free moment I’ve had to do such a thing since moving to Texas in August. So I took full advantage of it.
I started the process by making a backup of my data on my new external hard drive and did a clean install of the OS. This time I created two partitions: one for the OS, and the other for my data. I got the operating system install done with ease, only to discover that I was missing a bunch of software that I thought came with Tiger.
What I discovered was that iPhoto, iMovie, iDVD, GarageBand, and iTunes are part of a seperate package called iLife. I feel really dumb about this mistake. However, when I got my Mac a year ago, it came with everything preloaded on it and two CDs to do reinstalls. So my assumption was “oh this is all part of the OS”. Not so. Not that I mind paying to get the upgraded versions of the software. Because of the education pricing Tiger and iLife are super cheap for me. The problem was I didn’t have time to go to the campus software depot to remedy the problem before I took off for the conference. So that is at the top of my “to do list” when I get back.
The other issues I encountered when I did the upgrade is that I lost all my saved passwords. I typically set everything in my keychain so I don’t have to retype things. I lost all this in my clean install and I’m sitting here trying to dredge up from the recesses of my brain what my AIM password is. Don’t tell me just to use the “forgot my password” link on their site, the damn thing goes to an email I no longer have. At least I got my email, address book and Firefox settings to come over easily.
The spare moments I have at Code4Lib will be spent putting my development environment back together so that I have Tomcat, PHP, MySQL and Coldfusion back on my machine. Plus I need to check out some of the new features in iChat that I haven’t used before. Hopefully, this will go smoothly. I’ll have my machine exactly the way I want it when I get home and be able to say that the experience was more annoyance than disaster.