Here’s a fun fact for all of you computer enthusiasts:
I’ve been using the same MacBook Air for everything since late high school. A MacBook Air that I inherited from my Dad.
That he got in 2010.
Needless to say I’ve been in the market for an upgrade. That laptop may have served me well, but it was getting long in the tooth. Slow processing to the point of freezing, difficulty running complex programs and video games… You name it.
When I graduated, my parents asked what kind of gift they could get me to celebrate. I asked if I could get a new laptop, something to benefit my workflow as I transition out of academia.
Dad managed to snag this 2016 MacBook Air that was coming out of circulation at work:
2016 may seem outdated for a lot of you that prefer to keep on the razor’s edge of technology, but for me it’s a ridiculous leap forward.
Writing and uploading the photos for this blog post has been the smoothest process in three years, for instance.
The background image changes depending on the time of day.
That appeases me in a deep-rooted, giggly kind of way. Like jangling keys in front of a baby.
And I have at least five times the storage space on this machine:
I don’t know how I’ll ever fill 500 Gigabytes.
While I’ve only been using the new laptop for about eight hours or so, it has more than justified itself. Which is good considering how much of a pain it was to set the damn thing up.
Dad and I tried to directly transfer all of the information from my old machine to the new one, that way I wouldn’t lose files or progress on anything going on.
We started up the transfer when I went to work with him yesterday, as I would be joining him later that night for poker at his friend Don’s house.
You can see my whole Twitter thread on that experience here because…
It was special.
There were a good six or so hours spent at his office in Beverly Hills before we went to poker, and we set up the computers early hoping to finish before leaving.
Nothing really panned out the way we expected.
Some combination of not cleaning the old machine’s data enough, the hubris of assuming we could have both laptops connect to my iPhone’s wifi hotspot or who knows what else led to an extended transfer time.
We spent a whole lot of time watching the time estimate fluctuate between 20 minutes and 37 hours.
As a result I wasn’t able to spend any of the time at Fandango doing things on my computer, such as work on my novel. Plus my phone was less useful than usual because I couldn’t wear headphones when we plugged it in.
Luckily I brought my 3DS (because I’m still playing Sacred Stones), but that eventually ran out of battery.
The transfer wound up taking so long that we carried both computers out of the building while they were still open, and I looked like a nut during our drive with two laptops open while I played on my phone.
I only had to moonlight as a technophile hacker for a bit of the drive before the process finished, luckily enough.
Because of poker I couldn’t play around with the machine until this morning.
But now that I have, I think it’s time to use the improved processing power to finally make good on returning to a few things from my youth.
Starting with a little browser-based game called:
Hopefully tomorrow, assuming I don’t get too caught up playing this game I just bought with my friend Sam.
But that too will be a story for another day.
Work in Progress 
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