the felia transition

We've been off-air for a couple of days - as the regulars will already have perceived. No telecomms problems for a change. No hardware or software issues unless you count the transition to the new hardware/software setup.

It's been a long while since a new machine, as opposed to a new peripheral, came into our hands - long before we came here to Crete. The Powerbook G3/400 was our last purchase I think. Unless it was Gill's Special Edition Graphite iBook. Well, that's not counting the eMate300, but that was second hand anyway.

Opening Apple hardware is always such a joy. The packaging itself is sumptuous and extremely well made and designed. What comes out of the box/boxes is itself often breathtaking! And so it was this time.

And so. I opened the boxes: found some batteries that I put into the mouse and the keyboard; put the kit onto the desk; plugged in the single power cable and then I opened the Getting Started manual. Effectively it said - you've probably done all this - and yes I had. Next step switch it on and follow the setup procedure.

There is a neat little on button at the back of the screen - press it. A subtle light begins to glow. The machine springs into life and the familiar Mac interface starts to appear. From here on in it really is like falling off a log. The machine detects the mouse and the keyboard and the wireless network router and configures itself accordingly.

Within ten or fifteen minutes the machine has become my machine and has integrated itself into our computing environment. No drivers to locate and load. No IRQs or jumpers to set. Seamless. This is how it should be for all computer users.

Next up it's time to transfer all of the stuff from the old Powerbook to the new machine and even that would have been simple had the Powerbook been so old as to not have native Firewire - there were options offered to bring everything over.

And that is what has been happening for the past couple of days here on the farm as the rain fell serendipitously. Great chunks of software, tens of gig gobs of music and photos, multi-megabytes of documents - an entire history to relocate.

Sweet! We are getting there but already we are fully operational. We will find software that we use only occasionally that needs to come over. We will be pulling in things from other machines on the network to centralize things. What a wonderful early Xmas present!