Long Day

 Some days you just feel like the bell pepper shown below after a long day.

Sunday was the big day - the day I really buckled down to move as much as I could from the faithful old computer to this new, spiffy... annoying machine.  This has been a long time coming since I actually budgeted for and purchased the computer a while back.  But, new jobs, limited hours in the day and so many things changing found me putting this painful process off over and over again.  

Sadly, the blue screen of death has visited old faithful a few times recently and I know the signs that I cannot rely on it anymore.  That, and a couple of the keys stick.  But, I'll miss the little notch on the keyboard on the space bar where my thumbs have hit it many, many times over the years.  For that matter, you can tell what letters of the alphabet get used the least in normal English typing.  The label on those letters can still be read on my keyboard.  The common letters like "a", "s", "d", "n", "o" etc no longer have the label on them. 

Full disclosure - I was a computer scientist in a former life.  I am able to do this and I am not completely lost.  However... many of the trends for computer use and software development are leaving me behind.  Not entirely because I can't keep up mentally.  It has more to do with a couple of other factors:

1. Everything now assumes you have a constant, unlimited connection to the internet with excellent speeds.  If you don't - you have to work around everything.  And it just so happens that a large portion of rural America does not have reliable, fast internet.

2. Everyone now assumes that every individual wants to be fully connected to the rest of the world and we want all of our files on the cloud.  I don't.  Why would I want all of my files held hostage when the internet fails?  I want to work when I want to work - not just when the internet service says I can.  Besides, you can't access my personal data on the machine if I'm disconnected - so there's that too!

There are some fine pieces of software out there that you can purchase very reasonably that will move your files and even install your software for you (with a few hiccups of course - because, you know, computers).  But, these usually assume that you'll just upload everything into the cloud and then download it to the new machine.  

I'm sorry, but our internet contract would max out the data before I was a quarter of the way through the process.

Even if you do use this software, there is always a transition period where you figure out where everything on the user interface moved to.  The keys on the keyboard are a little bit different in spacing and feel, so the touch typist struggles too.  And, if you've been working with a number of software packages (some more than others), it is fairly major project just to be sure you have all of the files, settings and tools ready to go for when you need them.

I'm going to be mentally bruised for a while after this project.