Jenny got a new Powerbook

Jenny got a new Powerbook and I spent a few hours yesterday helping her move files over and set it up. It’s a damn nice machine. I’m impressed by the power brick, prosaic as that may seem–it’s clear that a lot of thought went into the design. The prongs fold out of the way for transport, and can pop off to be replaced by a special extension cord (in case you can’t squeeze the brick onto your outlet strip). It has little tabs that fold out for wrapping up the cord. It’s a small rounded square, sleek and white, like an iBook.

Migrating the files from one machine to the other wasn’t as simple as it should have been, because the old machine kept locking up during the file-transfer process. Very mysterious. We wound up compressing batches of files, uploading them to the net, and then downloading them. Sounds silly, but it works, and wasn’t any slower than doing it over the improvised LAN.