A few quick hits…

A couple of quick hits while I wait for backup #1 to finish.

Looks like I’ll be in SoCal the end of the month visiting mom. Normally I don’t advertise my trips south because they’ve tended to be kamikazee raids with no time for anything but family. This one might (or might not) be different, and I’m hoping maybe there’ll be some free time while I’m there. I’m hoping to get in a bit more extensive birding than I have the last few trips while migration is on, and try out a few new locations I’ve been researching.

And I finally (finally? hah-hah) upgraded to Snow Leopard this evening. Overall, things have gone pretty well so far; I made two separate backups PLUS a time machine backup, then erased the laptop disk and installed from scratch and then used the migration tool to copy my files over. The only glitch: I lost a couple of hours because the airport interface simply didn’t want to the time capsule, I couldn’t get a reliable connection, especially DNS. The third time I restarted the airport device, things seem to have finally settled in, and now it looks like I’m working properly. I’m thinking a downrev version of Parallels was getting in the way here, but why it took upgrading Parallels and THEN restarting the Time Capsule, I dunno, but that seemed to be what resolved it. go figure.

The printer drivers  all came in fine; haven’t tried the scanner yet. Nothing’s broken but I haven’t tried a lot (well, beyond cussing at the wifi…). Instead, I fired up the backups, and I’m now almost done with making a bootable copy of the new disk — which, if you’re counting at home means two bootable copies of Leopard plus a timemachine backup, AND two bootable copies of Snow Leopard (the laptop and an external firewire). Once that’s done, I’ll configure up Time Machine and let it run overnight to get started with Snow Leopard.

Yes, I am anal and paranoid about backups. Thanks for noticing. Of course, I also sleep well at night. (and I haven’t mentioned I also have about 50 gigs of data synced up on S3 via JungleDisk, so my itunes and photo libraries are updated nightly offsite…)

One neat feature I found: the battery status menubar item has been ehnaced so if your battery is sub-optimal, it warns you. Mine is only recharging to about 52% — it’s due for replacement — and it was a nice surprise to see that Apple is actually telling me that now, not requiring a third party tool to see the battery health.

And things seem faster — or at least crisper — than before. I’m pretty happy with things overall. At least to start.

On the other hand, the upgrade to the new iPhone software; I’ve had 3-4 random shutdowns of the phone since I’ve done that. Just all of a sudden non-responsive and requiring a power-up cycle. (and yes, I’m now living with multiple phones — three, if you must ask; thank you long-term contracts and since Laurie’s iPhone is on my contract as well, it was just too complicated to try to port my current mobile number to a Pre in the short term. Besides — ahem — my home office is a Sprint dead zone and has been for a few years since someone in a car took out the closest tower and from what I can tell, it was never replaced… Eventually I’ll sort all of this out, I’m sure.

And — grr — it looks like I’ve lost wifi connectivity again. back to the ethernet cable…

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