Worse than moving home!

I have spent basically the ENTIRE day trying to transfer from my old laptop to the new one which I will be working with from now on. It's more work and way worse than moving home in my opinion.

What a painful exercise!

I had an IBM Thinkpad T42p - it's a pretty nice machine. I was hoping to buy it over so I could keep using it, and keep an Ubuntu partition and keep contributing to the community in my spare (what's that?) time. However I was told I would have to pay R11 100 for it!!! Which is just far more than it is worth, so I opted to give it back instead. (If had R11k lying around I would be on a plane to Thailand!).

So I now have a used HP Compaq nx9010 from the new company. It is not awful, but the screen res is SO low. Anyone who saw my T42p's screen would know that I love high res and would rather blind than sacrifice a sexy looking display resolution ;)

So I have gone from a slick and sexy 1600 x 1200 to a puny 1024 x 768. Web pages and graphics just don't look as good like this, everything is too big and not subtle or stylish, and you can hardly use multi-pane views at all. *sulk*.

The keyboard layout is completely different - but then I never really got the hang of the IBM layout anyway, so this can't be worse. It does seem very high off the desk though which feels pretty odd. RSI here I come...?

For the record IE and Outlook SUCK! Gah I can't believe I am using this crud again. I am hoping to download Firefox soonest. Tab browsing ROCKS, I may have to hold off on installing Evolution though as I am not sure how compatible it will be in an MS exchange environment, with meeting bookings and calendar synchronization etc.

So far Windows itself hasn't annoyed me too much, but it certainly isn't as nice as Ubuntu, and this comes through in many varied and subtle ways. I am sure it won't be long until I am cursing, as I hate the way Windows takes over and just does stuff without you wanting it to. **

One annoying thing about Evo though is that it allows you to *Import* Contacts, Mails and calendar items, but then doesn't let you export again. Well not that I can find anyway. Gee thanks, that's helpful!

I don't have IRC installed yet, will do that when I have more time. I did download Open Office 2 though, still to be installed. As without that I wouldn't be able to access half my files.

Today I transferred all my mail (very tediously) over IMAP. For want of a better method that would transfer between Evolution and Outlook. First I copied all my stored folders back into my Evolution Inbox on the IBM, so it all copied back onto the server. I then IMAPed in on the HP and hey-presto (more like several hours later!) all my mail - in readable format - appeared in Outlook. My methods are normally pretty unorthodox, but I generally get the result I want. Oh, the wonders of limited skill but iron will! ;)

Several more hours were spent in a complicated data transfer process between the IBM, wirelessly linked to one of Richard's machines and then LAN connected to the HP. We couldn't get the laptops to share a drive directly so I had to do a 2-part copy. I turns out I have 10524 photos stored. I know this because the ^%**&%^%$*&#!! copy kept stopping half-way through for no apparent reason, so I did countless file-counts to check what was there and where the missing files were...

I think I have pretty much everything off the IBM now, but not everything is working on this machine (the HP) yet, so I am a bit in limbo and feeling a bit unsettled. I am sure this will come right in the next few days.

Having to set up web bookmarks/favorites re-login to all your regular sites and services (blogger, flickr, banking, wikis etc) is a real pain, especially when you cant remember your login details because you are so used to it being automatic... so more time went into that.

Then I was given a ton of stuff to study up on today (Testing theory and methodologies) so several hours where spent going through that too. Hang on just how many hours are there in a day...? Right that's why it's now 12:13am, so I am going to bed. Good night.

I'm posting in brown tones today in commemoration of Ubuntu - I miss you my friend.

** If that paperclip dares to show up on this machine I will become violent... ;)

Update: I just installed Firefox. YAY \o/. It really is SO much better than Internet Explorer. If you have not yet done so, try it NOW. I also installed mIRC, and that pretty much blows compared to XChat.