I’ve been mulling this for a while. Since I have an iPad and an iPhone, both now nattily upgraded to IOS 5, the question was, what about the computer? The beauties of the cloud are sort of lost if you don’t throw all your hardware into it. But I’ve got Velvet Elvis so nicely honed through years of experience, including the running of tournaments using VMWare Fusion, that I was loath to mess around with it. Since the DJ is within walking distance of an Apple store, I started cruising the mall with techlust in my heart.
These were the options:
1. Status quo, and no computer connection to the IOS 5 devices. But this is like buying a convertible and never putting the top down.
2. A new computer. Either I bought a Mac Mini and set up a new desktop, which would be the cheaper alternative, or I bought an Air, which has the virtue of inherent sexiness. I played with the Air a bit (the little one). Since in Lion you can expand the window to screen size, it was just about the same as Velvet Elvis, all things considered. But then the question is, does this tiny sucker become my home computer? That didn’t make sense. And the problem was an anchor computer, not an extra travel companion; VV already travels fine.
3. Bite the proverbial bullet and upgrade.
I knew that, one way or another, I could upgrade VV and still have TRPC somewhere. Worst case scenario is my Dell. So, I bit the bullet and visited the Mac App Store for the very first time on Monday night. Two minutes later I was downloading Lion.
Installing a new operating system is the sort of thing you do in your sleep. I mean, you start the installation, and then you go to bed, because it takes forever. And sure enough, yesterday morning as I was heading out the door to the DJ, I checked VV and there was a little welcome message explaining the brave new world of gestures to me. I gestured to the machine to be patient and went off to work.
Last night, after meeting with the Sailors, I attacked the Windows issue. I had realized at some point during the day that I hadn’t backed up my Windows stuff, which was no great loss, but would mean finding my Round Robin schema and reinstalling Word and Excel. By the way, the versions of Word and Excel that I run (this is XP, folks) are so old that in Word the alphabet only has 24 letters (Q and W weren’t invented yet) and Excel thinks that infinity is somewhere in the neighborhood of 42. Whatever. When I clicked on the icon to run my old version of Fusion, I was told about the difference between 32 and 64 bits in no uncertain terms, and that was that. So, I got the latest version of Fusion for Lion, and downloaded that. By now I was realizing that even though once upon a time I had set up Fusion like a house a’fire, I had forgotten how I had done it and would be faced with the daunting challenge of doing it again. Oh joy. Oh rapture.
And of course, I couldn’t install Fusion as an upgrade. I tried to install it as a second version of the software, keeping the first, having some dream that I could figure out how to port over stuff, but I couldn’t do that either. Sigh. So, I replaced the old Fusion with the new Fusion.
And all my Windows stuff was there! All my apps! My various versions of TRPC, including the one that does tenths of a point for judges who can tell the difference between a 27.3 performance and a 27.4. Word, Excel, RRs, pictures of O'C getting Cinderella's autograph—everything!
Life is good.
So, everything seems to be running well. I purchased some iTunes music, and sure enough afterwards it was in the cloud for every device. The calendar and contacts are humming. My version of iPhoto is too old to be clouded, but the comments in the App store say that this really isn’t working yet, so I can wait.
Tonight I check the printer drivers; they’re the sort of thing that almost inevitably require upgrades with a new OS, and the last thing I want to do is arrive at Regis Saturday unable to print a schematic. But the bottom line is, as with every other OS 10 upgrade I’ve done, and I’ve done them all, it was relatively painless. Next up is looking at the new features, which may or may not appeal (I’ve already sort of bought into the inverse scrolling).
And think of all the money I saved! Now maybe I can buy that Jambox…
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