Mac to Mac

All right, my imaginary vacation is over. Now it's back to my ongoing sorta permanent vacation, otherwise known as unemployment.

Not working has some advantages, though. The weather was really nice last week. The Mrs. and I had lunch with the Proper Bostonian outside at Piattini on Newbury Street, and we even had a brief visit from the male contingent of our West Coast relatives (our two nephews and their stepdad), who were on their way back from visiting one of the stepdad's relatives in Vermont. We had a nice dinner at Watch City Brewing in Waltham, and a tasty brunch at the Warren Tavern in Charlestown.

TWiA took the weekend off, in case you were wondering. I had intended to post something yesterday, but I got wrapped up in a home tech project: when I left my job I was able to take my computer with me. It has a lot of useful software on it that I didn't already have on my home computer, so I had planned to switch over eventually. My current monitor is six years old and is starting to show its age (it's too dim when first turned on, and takes a couple of minutes to stop flickering and reach proper brightness), so it seemed like the right time to make the switch. The work computer is an iMac, so the external display won't be needed.

When you buy a new Mac to replace an older one, you can use a utility called Migration Assistant to copy all the relevant stuff from old computer to new. But with a machine that's been in use for a while and has software you want to keep, I'm not sure the assistant would work. I suppose I could have gone into an Apple store and asked someone, but I remembered that you can also connect two Macs with a Firewire cable and make one appear on the desktop of the other, just like an external drive, and then just drag files from one to the other.

Now that that's been accomplished, I need to go through the browsers and make sure I have all the bookmarks I want, and go through iTunes and make sure I have all the music I want. Then the old computer can be officially decommissioned.