I went out for a walk early this morning and saw this fine fellow – he let me get pretty close before flying away.

Diane read Torah at Shir Hadash this morning, but I wasn’t able to be there, because I had to go to the Toastmasters District Council Meeting. Fortunately, it was on Zoom; unfortunately, it wasn’t very productive – we’ll have to re-vote on the District Budget after a few questions get answered.

I spent most of the rest of the day moving Diane’s photos and programs to my old MacBook Air, as planned. The first step was to reinstall Windows yet again so that I can (I hope) reuse the Windows Pro license I’d bought for her old machine – that was pretty straightforward.

Then I copied her photos and the Artisan software to the new machine. Again, easy. But when I tried to bring over the art kits and other assets she uses to create her projects, I ran into problems – none of the tagging she’d done came across.

One of the problems is that the software scatters assets all over the file system – Diane’s photos and “personal art kits” are in her Documents directory, but “commercial art kits” are in \Users\Public\Documents, which makes no sense to me. I tried to put everything into her Documents directory, but it didn’t work.

Apparently Windows programs save their state in subdirectories of the user’s AppData\Roaming\ directory; some of the instructions I found called for copying some specific files from there to the new machine. I wonder if copying the entire subdirectory would bring over all of the work she’s done – I’ll find out tomorrow, I guess.

Oh, well, at least I’m getting familiar with Windows again!

We got our covalent Moderna boosters this morning at Valley Med – it was a smooth operation, as usual. They’ve made me wait 30 minutes for all four of the previous vaccines, but this time they let me go after the normal 15 minutes.

I’m a little bit achy and my arm is sore, but I don’t expect to need Tylenol. Diane’s reaction this time is less than previous shots.

The Windows Experiment went pretty well – well enough that I deleted my photos, music, and pretty much everything else from the Mac partition and am reinstalling Windows to give it as much disk space as possible (888 GB). Tomorrow, we’ll try to copy Diane’s photo programs and libraries to the Mac; I picked up yet another SSD tonight in hopes of simplifying and speeding up the process.

Now that I’ve migrated to this nice M2 Mac Book Air, the next question is “what should I do with the Intel Mac Book Air?” I could try to sell it privately or trade it in at Apple, but I hope to be able to use it to run Diane’s Windows apps instead. It’s got twice the memory and four times the disk space of her existing laptop, and the processor is four generations newer, too.

This afternoon, I installed Windows 10 on a Boot Camp partition and then I installed trial versions of Diane’s mission-critical applications (Forever Artisan and Forever Historian) to see if they work. They seem to, at least to the extent that I use them; tomorrow, I’ll copy Diane’s data over and let her decide if it’s a plausible environment for her to use.

The last time I used Apple’s Migration Assistant to set up a new computer, copying the data took a long time (several hours) using the house network. Last night, I used a Thunderbolt 4 cable, and it made a big difference – I migrated everything over (about 600MB) while I was out for an evening walk (about an hour).

The most remarkable thing about switching to this computer is how unremarkable the experience has been. Yes, it’s faster (but that will only make a difference when I’m editing photos or compiling code – most of the time, it’s waiting for me, not the other way around). Yes, it’s quieter (no fan). Yes, the screen is a little bigger and brighter. But it’s basically the same environment – moving to Mac OS 13 (Ventura) will be a bigger disruption than switching computers was.

The High Holy Days planning committee met this afternoon at Shir Hadash; one of the high-priority topics was sending out the invitations to those congregants who have honors at one of the services (Rosh Hashanah is less than a week away). I got the last bits of information I needed and fired off the program to send the invitations, and the replies started coming in right away.

And then I discovered that, in my zeal to convert the services schedule file from Excel to Google Sheets, I had messed up the dates in the file, so the invitations for Yom Kippur honors had the wrong date (and, in some cases, the wrong times!). I sent out a correction, but it wasn’t completely successful – we’re still getting responses from people who wonder what the actual times and dates are.

I’m tempted to send out another correction, but I wonder if it would make things even worse.

After I finally left Shir Hadash, I drove over to the Apple Store to pick up my laptop – I’m still not quite sure where it’s going to fit in the grand scheme of things. My original thought was to attach it to my external drives and 4K monitor except when we’re traveling, but the more I think of doing that, the less I like it.

For now, I’m just migrating my old laptop’s contents to the new machine and I’ll use it in the kitchen (and when I travel). It would be nice to be able to attach it to the 4K monitor and use it for photo editing at home, but I’m not sure it’s physically feasible without moving a lot of devices around.

And we booked our travel for our spring trip to France; we had BA vouchers to use, so we’ll be traveling via Heathrow, but I can hope that the security lines there will be shorter in May, right?